To say a man might disobey and be none the worse would be to say that no might be yes and light sometimes darkness.
I lost myself, and if I hadn’t found the beautiful lady, I should never have found myself.
Why know the name of a thing when the thing itself you do not know? Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!” But.
His marriage was of infinitely more salvation to the laird than if it had set him free from all his worldly embarrassments, for it set him growing again – and that is the only final path out of oppression.
For I had long thought that the way to make indifferent things bad, was for good people not to do them.
There is one kind of religion in which the more devoted a man is, the fewer proselytes he makes: the worship of himself.
But is it not rather that art rescues nature from the weary and sated regards of our senses, and the degrading injustice of our anxious everyday life, and, appealing to the imagination, which dwells apart, reveals Nature in some degree as she really is, and as she represents herself to the eye of the child, whose everyday life, fearless and unambitious, meets the true import of the wonder-teeming world around him, and rejoices therein without questioning?
Our moon,” he answered, “is not like yours-the old cinder of a burnt-out world; her beams embalm the dead, not corrupt them.
Heed not thy feeling. Do thy work.
The thing most alien to the true idea of humanity is the notion that our well-being lies in surpassing our fellows. We have to rise above ourselves, not above our neighbors, to take all the good of them not from them, and give them all our good in return. That which cannot be freely shared can never be possessed.
God is just!′ said a carping theologian to me the other day. ‘Yes,’ I answered, ’and he cannot be pleased that you should call that justice which is injustice, and attribute it to him!
The secret of your own heart you can never know; but you can know Him who knows its secret.
There is hardly a limit to the knowledge and sympathy a man may have in respect of the finest things, and yet be a fool. Sympathy is not harmony. A man may be a poet even, and speak with the tongue of an angel, and yet be a very bad fool.
God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.
But then to every lover of the truth, a true thing is dearer because it is old-fashioned, and dearer because it is new-fashioned: and true music, like true love, like all truth, laughs at the god Fashion, because it knows him to be but an ape.
As soon as a man begins to make excuses, the time has come when he might be doing that from which he excuses himself.
Instead of automatically blaming the person who does not believe in God, we should ask first if his notion of God is a God that ought to be believed in.
I never heard of her loving anybody but herself, and I do not think she could have managed that if she had not somehow got used to herself.
Self-loathing is not sorrow. Yet it is good, for it marks a step in the way home, and in the father’s arms the prodigal forgets the self he abominates. Once with his father, he is to himself of no more account.
You ought to have principles of your own, Mr Walton.” “I hope I have. And one of them is, not to make mountains of molehills; for a molehill is not a mountain. A man ought to have too much to do in obeying his conscience and keeping his soul’s garments clean, to mind whether he wears black or white when telling his flock that God loves them, and that they will never be happy till they believe it.