Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes?
It is a great privilege to be poor, Peter. You must not mistake, however, and imagine it a virtue; it is but a privilege, and one also that may be terribly misused.
There can hardly be a plainer proof of the lowness of our nature, until we have laid hold of the higher nature that belongs to us by birthright, than this, that even a just anger tends to make us unjust and unkind.
What is called a good conscience is often but a dull one that gives no trouble when it ought to bark loudest;.
Either there is a God, and that God the perfect heart of truth and loveliness, or all poetry and art is but an unsown, unplanted, rootless flower, crowning a somewhat symmetrical heap of stones.
Suddenly pressing both hands on her heart, she fell to the ground, and the mist rose from her and melted in the air. I ran to her. But she began to writhe in such torture that I stood aghast. A moment more and her legs, hurrying from her body, sped away serpents. From her shoulders fled her arms as in terror, serpents also. Then something flew up from her like a bat, and when I looked again, she was gone.
Now he learned what law and order and truth are, what consent and harmony mean; how the individual may find his own end in a higher end, where law and freedom mean the same thing, and the purest certainty exists without the slightest constraint.
Complaint against God is far nearer to God than indifference about Him.
Sweet sounds can go where kisses may not enter.
Low-sunk life imagines itself weary of life, but it is death, not life, it is weary of.
That’s right, grannie! And the rich have to look down on the poor.” “No, my dear. I did not say that. The rich have to be KIND to the poor.
Of all things let us avoid the false refuge of a weary collapse, a hopeless yielding to things as they are. It is the life in us that is discontented: we need more of what is discontented, not more of the cause of its discontent.
It was evening. The sun was below the horizon; but his rosy beams yet illuminated a feathery cloud, that floated high above the world. I arose, I reached the cloud; and, throwing myself upon it, floated with it in sight of the sinking sun. He sank, and the cloud grew gray; but the grayness touched not my heart. It carried its rose-hue within; for now I could love without needing to be loved again.
I need a God; and if there be none how did I come to need one?
Contempt is murder committed by the intellect, as hatred is murder committed by the heart.
The question is not at present, however, of removing mountains, a thing that will one day be simple to us, but of waking and rising from the dead now.
I do not say we are called upon to dispute and defend the truth with logic and argument, but we are called upon to show by our lives that we stand on the side of truth. But when i say truth, I do not mean opinion. To treat opinion as if that were truth is grievously to wrong the truth. The soul that loves the truth and tries to be true will know when to speak and when to be silent.
He rebelled against the highest as if the highest were the lowest – as if the power that could create a heart for bliss, might gloat on its sufferings.
Jesus tells us we must leave the self altogether-yield it, deny it, refuse it, lose it. Thus only shall we save it... The self is given us that we may sacrifice it. It is ours in order that we, like Christ, may have something to offer- not that we should torment it, but that we should deny it; not that we should cross it, but that we should abandon it utterly.
Work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.