But though she spent nearly seven lire, the gates of liberty seemed still unopened.
You can’t fight Medusa with anything else. If you ask me what the Spirit of Life is, or to what it is attached, I can’t tell you. I only tell you, watch for it. Myself I’ve found it in books. Some people find it out of doors or in each other. Never mind. It’s the same spirit, and I trust myself to know it anywhere, and to use it rightly.
She thought of her distant youth. The world was not so humorous then, but it had been more important.
Once more the west was retreating, once again the orderly stars were dotting the eastern sky. There is certainly no rest for us on the earth. But there is happiness, and as Margaret descended the mound on her lover’s arm, she felt that she was having her share.
He and his friends there believed in free speech. But they spoke freely about generalities. They were scientific and philosophic. They would have shrunk from the empirical freedom that results from a little beer.
All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all.
But who can explain Westminster Bridge Road or Liverpool Street in the morning – the city inhaling – or the same thorough-fares in the evening – the city exhaling her exhausted air? We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster, and stamped with a human face.
Gallantry, charity, and art pursued their various missions, perspiring and muddy, while out on the slopes beyond them stood the eternal man and the eternal dog, guarding eternal sheep until the world is vegetarian.
He was more skilled than they were in the principles of human existence, but he was not so indecently familiar with the examples. A sordid village scandal – such as Stephen described as a huge joke – sprang from certain defects in human nature, with which he was theoretically acquainted. But the example!
He loved poetry – science was merely an acquisition, which he laid aside when unobserved like his European dress...
He was accustomed to sheep, but had never happened to meet them in a wood before, and disliked it. He retired, slowly at first, then fast; and the flock, in a dense mass, pressed after him. His terror increased. He turned and screamed at their long white faces; and still they came on, all stuck together, like some horrible jell –.
Religion was to him a service, a mystic communion with good; not a means of getting what he wanted on the earth.
Even when we love people, we desire to keep some corner secret from them, however small: it is a human right: it is personality.
Serious not in the sense of glum; but they must be convinced that our life is a state of some importance, and our earth not a place to beat time on.
He felt that nonsense and beauty have close connections, – closer connections than Art will allow, – and that both would remain when his own heaviness and his own ugliness had perished.
Madness is not for everyone, but Maurice’s proved the thunderbolt that dispels the clouds.
The world, he believed, is a globe of men who are trying to reach one another and can best do so by the help of good will plus culture and intelligence –.
I’m thankful it’s into your hands I fell.
Come this way immediately,” commanded Cecil, who always felt that he must lead women, though he know not whither, and protect them, though he knew not against what.
It is a pity that Man cannot be at the same time impressive and truthful.