Trocar

“ Transmigration, in some form, has certainly been, if not hereafter to be, the lot of man. I do not believe the Platonic conception of this great truth to be the correct one, nor that man will ever undergo the doom again; yet. that the soul has reached its present through many an inferior state, is a self-evident fact to me. ”

“ Your own change is quite sufficient—it gives us all we need. It will give us, if we retrace the steps of it, everything, everything!"
Mrs. Briss considered. "I don't quite see, do I? why, at this hour of the night, we should begin to retrace steps." ”

“ What a dislocation of comfort is comprised in that word 'moving.' Such a heap of little nasty things, after you think all is got into the cart: old dredging-boxes, worn-out brushes, gallipots, vials, things that it is impossible the most necessitous person can ever want, but which the women who preside on these occasions will not leave behind if it was to save your soul. ”

“ It is a noticeable development of a richly endowed moral nature,—this change of one, who seemed so wholly and perfectly made and fitted for the element in which she then moved, into a being at least as thoroughly adapted to a life so violently contrasted to it in all ways. ”

“ There are two considerations which make me most reluctant to accept the doctrine of transmigration—the one is that when we leave our human frames and enter into those of dog or slug, what wretchedness it will be for us to adapt our minds and feelings to doggish or sluggish limits. ”

“ And then, quite suddenly, there swept over him the fierce, insistent longing for change which wrestles with every man at some time or other in his life; the hot desire to fling himself out of the rut into which that life inevitably must settle, to encounter anything, good or bad, so long as it brought a change. ”

“ Reparation? To you! It is you who can offer me no reparation for the offence against my feelings--and my person; for what reparation can be adequate for your odious and ridiculous plot so scornful in its implication, so humiliating to my pride. No! ”

“ But if he come down among men, he must undergo a change, and a change from good to evil, from virtue to vice, from happiness to misery, and from best to worst. Who, then, would make choice of such a change? ”

“ Change is the very essence of enjoyment! change of habits, change of company, and change of air, are all equally necessary, and I never have a guinea in the world without instantly getting it changed. That custom will make a scarcity of silver at the bank, when I marry the heiress, Miss Howard. ”

“ Life is as it is, he thought, and can we hope to change it because we change? Surely not. Everything had its price, and he had really never paid the price of that ten-years-old bargain till now—he acknowledged it. ”

“ The suddenness of the change is most striking, and you pass at once from all the bustling interests of life—its cares and ambitions, its pursuits of wealth and pleasure—into the stillness of a cloister. ”

“ There is, in any case, this difference, that the new character—i.e., new ways of feeling, thinking, and acting—is lasting. This could not be, if in both stages, incubation and eruption, a profound change had not taken place in the individual constitution. Conversions do not create a new tendency, but they show that the greatest antitheses are latent in us, and that one may replace the other, not by an act of the will, which is always precarious, but by a radical transformation of our sensibility. ”

“ Truckling, compromise, time-serving, capitulations of conscience, are conventionally opprobrious names for what, if successfully carried out, would be on his principles by far the easiest and most praiseworthy mode of bringing about that harmony between inner and outer relations which is all that he means by good. ”

“ Imagine for an instant that we could gather them, put them together and place them all in the hands of one being who, with one movement, would scatter them all around us. Would not the change in our character, in our thoughts, in our feelings be very remarkable? ”

“ It is this consideration of other people or rather this cowardly fear of them which we call consideration that makes us the sentimental slaves we are. To consider you, as you call it, is to substitute your will for my own. ”

“ Presumptous choice as to these alternatives failed, on my part, in time, let me say, to flower; it rose before me in time that, whatever might be, for the exposed instant, the deep note of their encounter, only one thing concerned me in it: its being wholly their own business. So for that I liberally let it go, passing into the corridor, but proceeding in the opposite sense and aiming at an issue which I judged I should reach before they would turn in their walk. ”

“ He has a way of giving you your change which seems to say, "Is it the full change you expect?" If you keep your hand held out, and appear to examine what he gives you, his look says: "You are one of the wideawake sort; we understand each other." ”

“ Stop, my love; I never sanction the belief that any mistakes are quite beyond reparation. You have committed errors in your management of yourself; but, while you live, you have the power of retracing your steps. ”

“ And you will not be one until your whole life is transformed, until you become a different man. If you do not change, it is my duty to warn you that sorrow and suffering, the uneasiness which you now know, and which drive you on, in search of distraction, to adding useless sums of money to your fortune—this suffering, I say, will become intensified. ”

“ While I despair of inducing him by my reasonings to make the smallest change in the least of his habits, I ask him, not with a light heart, but with a hopeful one, to submit his whole being to a change that is for him the making of his whole world anew. ”

“ It is the form which changes, not the essence. The few great underlying elements from which character and happiness are evolved are permanent—their mutations are endless. Dull-minded, we take the mutations to mean shifting of principle. ”

“ After all, if the old order crumbled, was it not because of its own weakness? Was not the fact of its decay the sign of some secret disintegration, of rottenness at the core? And if the new spirit could destroy, perhaps it could build as well. ”

“ There are no charges, Mercer, to be met in that way. I've told you already why I should like a change made, if you can bring yourself to consider it. It isn't only the people of our own sort, as you say, that you don't get on with. You're at loggerheads with half your parishioners at one time or another. My girls are always coming across it, wherever they go. ”

“ And men saw with wonder that a change had passed over the old beggar, even as he spoke. What had seemed, but now, to be vile rags and splashes of mud, were seen to be in truth kingly trappings, broidered with gold, and sparkling with gems. ”

“ If you get hit soon after you've done wrong, you think it's retribution, and if it holds off till you've forgotten all about it, you think it's a strange Providence, and you puzzle over it, but you don't reform. ”

“ The process, as far as the change of soul state is concerned, is infinitely more to the amelioration of the lowest than to the degradation of the highest. The one, also, is more real, the other more apparent. ”

“ And thus it continually befell, that the new thought must weave a new garment for itself, those which it found ready made being narrower than that it could wrap itself in them; that the new wine must fashion new vessels for itself, if both should be preserved, the old being neither strong enough, nor expansive enough, to hold it. ”

“ People talk of great changes in life, and point to periods and events which seem to have turned their whole course into a different channel; but there is nothing that can happen to any individual which will make such an alteration in his life as conversion. ”

“ If I should happen to get one converted he would not stay converted, so I have concluded, and I think wisely, to let them go, and not suffer myself to have any more feelings about it than I would about any of the common occurrences of life. ”

“ These, with the vast fields of adjusting improved social relations and reforms--all of which in a certain way opens dazzling vistas of a certain kind of enchantment or brilliant hope--will go fast and far to change the old romance to a radically different state of feeling and association. ”

“ The most predominant expression that I saw upon 'change was affectation; the affectation of business; not the silly school-boy affectation which wears off with the improving mind, but that which is first put on by business men, to disguise the real operations of the mind, and which afterward grows into a confirmed habit, and is seen deeply set in wrinkles, long after the first exciting cause has disappeared. ”

“ The change will be recognized by many, who, after a period of happiness, have endeavored to go on with the same kind of life, in the same scene, in spite of the alteration or withdrawal of some principal circumstance. ”

“ In Diversion, as in many other Particulars, the upper Part of Life is distinguished from the Lower. Let the Great therefore answer for the Employment of their Time, to themselves, or to their spiritual Governors. ”

“ And, as here, in our outer world, we know that men and women change,—become worse or better as temptation or conscience may guide them,—so should these creations of his change, and every change should be noted by him. On the last day of each month recorded, every person in his novel should be a month older than on the first. ”

“ Every act must needs be attended by consequences, and as these are usually of too far-reaching a character to be exhausted in the life of the doer of the action, they cannot but engender another person by whom they are to be borne. This truth is popularly expressed by the doctrine of transmigration, according to which individuals, as the character of their deeds may determine, are re-born as pigs or peacocks, beggars or princes. ”

“ All can be altered; and one day the last shall be first. It's just the same in your case. For the moment, things are going badly with you, but that can be altered too... if you've enough intelligence to change your company. ”

“ What is your notion of the original which you pretend to be about to restore? The problem that presents itself becomes more difficult, more complex, the longer you look at it—the problem, namely, what you are going to restore. ”

“ If I had the material to work with I would rather make new ones, than patch up the old ones: but as we have not the new materials to work upon, we must patch up the old ones. Patch up yourselves—make your characters comely to each other. ”

“ Trust small craft for discovering one man to another. Before three days and three nights had passed, we stood before each other, he and I, stripped to our souls. His every movement was an aggravation to me, especially when he played with the bespangled sextant and toy chronometer he had brought, and when each day, on plotting out my position on the chart according to dead reckoning, I found his, by observation, already there. ”

“ And if the voice of men in general is to weigh at all in a matter of this kind, it does but corroborate these instinctive feelings. A convert is undeniably in favor with no party; he is looked at with distrust, contempt, and aversion by all. ”

“ When the cry is raised that there must be a change to “shake up things,” he will consider that no change will benefit him unless it be a change for the better. Somebody may advise you to change the watch-dog in your yard, and to appoint the fox to watch over your hen-roost. ”

“ Well, we are ordered a change, or, driven by our instincts, we seek one, or the blessed holiday season comes round at last. We go away, and in fresh air, in a change of occupation, amid new interests and associations, we begin to feel quite different. ”

“ It is a question, after all, whether it is the preferable qualities of the new things which they meet that leads them to adopt them, or whether it is a mania simply for what is new. At the best they are in a stage of transition. ”

“ The whole fabric seems to have tumbled to pieces; it lies in a horrible chaos. I can make no order within myself. Have I lied to myself? have I acted and postured the Great Man to persuade myself that I am one? ”

“ His mistakes and misfortunes reveal the nature of the mores, their power over the individual, their pertinacity against later influences, the confusion in character produced by changing them, and the grip of habit which appears 108both in the persistence of old mores and the weakness of new ones. Every emigrant is forced to change his mores. He loses the sustaining help of use and wont. He has to acquire a new outfit of it. The traveler also experiences the change from life in one set of mores to life in another. ”

“ This social principle, we may note, rests upon a deeper psychological principle, that old habits are usually not replaced by new habits without an intervening period of confusion and uncertainty. In other words, in the transition from the old habit to the new habit there is much opportunity for disorganization and disintegration. ”