World

“ What strange developments of humanity, what wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilization, I thought, might not appear when I came to look nearly into the dim, elusive world that raced and fluctuated before my eyes! ”

“ Here he will be introduced to a world of thought and sentiment almost as fresh, as fair and many-sided as Nature herself,—the fragrant blossoming in myriad hues and forms of the life and mind of the most richly endowed portion of the human race. ”

“ What a world is ours. What a problem is life. Is there any word in the English language more suggestive? Life—its surroundings, aspects, all its outward associations. Is this the limit? Would to Heaven in some instances it were so, that the end be thus. ”

“ Beneath all this gloss of the world—this cold conventional aspect, which all more or less present, and which the business of life renders necessary—there resides for certain a fountain of goodness, pure in its inner depths as the lymph rock-distilled, and ready on every proper occasion to well out in the exercise of the noblest duties. ”

“ Then you are the world, the measure of right, of truth, of beauty. If we will not be mar-plots with our miserable interferences, the work, the society, letters, arts, science, religion of men would go on far better than now, and the heaven predicted from the beginning of the world, and still predicted from the bottom of the heart, would organize itself, as do now the rose and the air and the sun. ”

“ Is there, then, a world, a world of law in which 2 and 2 make 4, an animal world in which all the lowest and most disgusting instincts may come to the surface at any moment, and yet in which such revelations of beauty in human life—revelations lasting for a moment, or a day, or a month, or a year, or an eternity of years—occur? ”

“ The other souls that, passing in their place,
⁠Each in his groove;
Outstretching hands that chain me and embrace,
⁠Speak and reprove.
"O atom of that law, by which the earth
⁠Is poised and whirled:
Behold! you hurrying with the crowd assert
⁠You are the world." ”

“ I want to hear about this world, this world I am going to leave, and how you think you are going on fighting in the hot and dusty struggle—to make the world cool and kind and reasonable, to train minds better, to broaden ideas ... ”

“ We all exaggerate out of their proper perspective in the phenomena of a universe the things that are around us and about us—the events we witness or take part in, the things that are ours, and the affairs of the street, city, state, neighbourhood, world, and time, in which we live. ”

“ And what ye have called the world shall but be created by you: your reason, your likeness, your will, your love, shall it itself become! ”

“ So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect,—What is truth? and of the affections,—What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ”

“ For the active world, the money-making, breeding, pleasure-seeking, power-loving world, the rulers, artists, poets, merchants, soldiers, the great world as distinguished from the studious faction of scientists, theologians, philosophers, and men of letters—an insignificant and negligible minority in this particular: for this great world, God sums imagination ”

“ And it is not in fact “of this world,” if by world we mean what the word ordinarily implies,—the world which confronts us, and which we can point out to ourselves and to others; the world which, being the object of our experience, is the direct antithesis of what we are, subject of experience, free personality, spirit, Christian humanity. ”

“ But this actual world of experience, in which we are, and which is in us, remains both the material and the limits of our consideration: a world which is so rich in content that even the most searching investigation of which the human mind is capable could not exhaust it. ”

“ A new and dazzling world swam into the ken of his readers—a world in which the individual reigned in glory amid the glowing panorama of Nature and among the wondrous visions of a remote and holy past. ”

“ This eternal world is about us and within us while we live here. 'Heaven is nearer to our souls than the earth is to our bodies.' The world which we ordinarily think of as real is an arbitrary selection from experience, corresponding roughly to the average reaction of life upon the average man. ”

“ And flowers the beauty showed that lay entombed, — Yes, now, wherever light, as dawn begins, A new created world from chaos wins, — And in the thousand eyes that, from the sky, Show night and day the heavenly mystery, — Onwards, to where, in thought’s eternal truth Nature’s deep self rewords itself in truth, — There stirs one might, one pulse-beat all sufficing, All power retaining, aye, — and sacrificing. ”

“ Is it not true, then, that my life with all its limitations touches at many points the life of the World Beautiful? Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content. ”

“ We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much natural force, perhaps, but for the rest—blank; and the world tells us what we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us. ”

“ Look round the habitable world, how few
Know their own good, or, knowing it, pursue. ”

“ Physical phenomena of every day experience; the alternations of light and darkness, of sunshine and clouds; the changes and oppositions in the outer world, would readily supply an analogy to the moral world. ”

“ Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world; and beyond its world, a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. ”

“ He grows up in an atmosphere of example and general custom, his life widens out from one little world to other and higher worlds, and he apprehends through successive stations the whole in which he lives, and in which he has lived. ”

“ These three views of life are as follows: First, embracing the individual, or the animal view of life; second, embracing the society, or the pagan view of life; third, embracing the whole world, or the divine view of life. ”

“ Their attention to life has changed its character, sharpened its focus: and as a result they see, some a wider landscape, some a more brilliant, more significant, more detailed world than that which is apparent to the less educated, less observant vision of common sense. ”

“ Our very theory insists that your internal meanings, your ideas viewed as internally significant, your selections and expressions, are typical instances of facts, and of precisely the facts of whose unity the world consists. ”

“ Thus, then, we are tossed back and forth between the possibilities suggested by our hypothesis. “The world is the manifestation of infinite reason;” good, then, but how? “The world is a rational growth from lower to higher.” ”

“ It is just because all meanings, in the end, will prove to be internal meanings, that this which the internal meaning most loves, namely the presence of concrete fulfilment, of life, of pulsating and originative will, of freedom, and of individuality, will prove, for our view, to be of the very essence of the Absolute Meaning of the world. ”

“ This generalised form of attention, which we attribute to the Absolute Experience, is now conceived by us as that aspect of this Absolute which, in the total movement of the world’s unity, determines the ideas to find this concrete realisation which they do find. ”

“ These friends and servants of mankind have used, in fact, that source of insight which I mentioned in the closing words of the last lecture, a source by means of which the results and the moving principles of individual experience, of social experience, of reason, and of will are brought into a certain creative unity to which the noblest spiritual attainments of our world are due. ”

“ To repeat the whole nature of the world abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts, and thus to store up, as it were, a reflected image of it in permanent concepts always at the command of the reason; ”

“ And now, as to the true serial order of this world of Life, we have, from the outset of our exposition of our Fourth Concept, recognized that, whatever the world contains, it contains in the form of a Self-Conscious Being. ”

“ Here is the world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a mark of haste, or botching, or second thought; but the theory of the world is a thing of shreds and patches. ”

“ “On what else is the whole world run but immediate impressions? What is more practical? My friend, the philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, its business is run on spiritual impressions and atmospheres. ”

“ The next hypothesis concerning the matter is, that this world (our globe) is, and must, and will for all eternity be, the abiding place and scene of activity of all mankind, who ever have been or will be born on it, through all the past and all the future ages. ”

“ Going forth into the bareness and darkness of this unwalled world of high contemplation, you there find stored for you, and at last made real, all the highest values, all the dearest and noblest experiences of the world of growth and change. ”

“ The progress of the whole world is described by Scripture, as in a beautiful poem, wherein one may follow the descent of time, and contemplate the variety, manifoldness, equity, order, righteousness, and beauty of the multitude of divine judgments proceeding from the wisdom of God ruling the world: and as with a poem, so with this ordering of the world, one cannot see its beauty save by considering the whole.... ”

“ To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship ”

“ But even among these mere physical elements of the world, when we consider them with reference to living things, we find many arrangements which, on a reflective view, excite our admiration, by the beneficial effect, and seemingly beneficent purpose. ”

“ For the world is—allow us the homely figure—the human being turned inside out. All that moves in the mind is symbolized in Nature. Or, to use another more philosophical, and certainly not less poetic figure, the world is a sensuous analysis of humanity, and hence an inexhaustible wardrobe for the clothing of human thought. Take any word expressive of emotion—take the word emotion itself—and you will find that its primary meaning is of the outer world. In the swaying of the woods, in the unrest of the “wavy plain,” the imagination saw the picture of a well-known condition of the human mind; ”

“ Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we? ”

“ I have seen how the foundations of the world are laid, and I have not the least doubt that it will stand a good while. ”

“ As to the particular—there is something external and internal in every one; body and soul in every one; this is his present and future world. As to the common signification—there is an external and an internal world, that is, the material world is the present, and the future is the internal world. ”

“ 'Know thyself' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world 'Be thyself' shall be written. ”

“ The secret of the world is, the tie between person and event. Person makes event, and event person. ”