More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
To become able to make something is, I think, necessary to thorough development.
What advantage the carpenter of Nazareth gathered from his bench, is the inheritance of every workman, in proportion as he does divine, that is, honest work.
it is only when one can perfectly work after the perfect rule, that he may be trusted with variations and exceptions.
"genius seldom gets beyond board-wages!" It did not occur to him that genius least requires more than board-wages.
He had good health; what was better, a good temper; and what was better still, a willing heart toward his neighbour.
If there be a God and one has never sought him, it will be small consolation to remember that he could not get proof of his existence.
How much of Christianity a child may or may not learn by going to church, it is impossible to say;
Some natures have a better chance of disclosing the original in them, that they have not been to college, and set to think in other people's grooves,
In the roughest part of his history it was his habit to go to church—mainly, I may say entirely, for the organ, but his behaviour was never other than reverent. How much he understood, may be left a question somewhat dependent on how much there may have been to understand;
The man as can do anything, can do everything."
When an old tale comes to me from the far-away time, I don't pitch it into the road, any more'n I would an old key or an old shoe—a horse-shoe, I mean: it was something once, and it may be something again! I hang the one up, and turn the other over.
All things belong to every man who yields his selfishness, which is his one impoverishment, and draws near to his wealth, which is humanity—not humanity in the abstract, but the humanity of friends and neighbours and all men. Selfishness, I repeat, whether in the form of vanity or greed, is our poverty.
The words which represented it he would have thought he understood, but he would never have laid hold of the idea.
He had indeed begun to learn that a man has his duty to mind before his happiness, and that was much; but he had not yet been tried in the matter of doing his duty when unhappy. How would he feel then? Would he think duty without happiness worth living for? He was happy now, and that was enough!
He found himself here:—whence he came he did not care; whither he went he did not inquire. The present was enough, for the present was good; when the present was no longer good, why, then,—!
It's my opinion the only way to learn the worth of a thing, is to have to go without it."
But in truth Richard had hardly yet begun to think. He only followed the things that came to him; he never said to things, Come; neither, when they came, did he keep them, and make them walk up and down before him till he saw what they were; he did not search out their pedigree, get them to give an account of themselves, show what they could do, or, in short, be themselves to him. He had written a few verses—not bad verses, but with feeling only, not thought in them. For instance, he had addressed an ode to the allegorical personage called Liberty, in which he bepraised her until, had she been
...more
"When a book is hard to come at, you are the more ready to read it when you have the chance."
The man who is growing to be one with his own nature, that is, one with God who is the naturing nature, is coming nearer and nearer to every one of his fellow-beings. This may seem a long way round to love, but it is the only road by which we can arrive at true love of any kind; and he who does not walk in it, will one day find himself on the verge of a gulf of hate.
so heartily had she gone in for sorrow, that her mind was shaped to weeping.
Are we for ever to bear without hope the presence of the cruel, the vulgar self-souled, the neighbour-crushing rich?
What is called a good conscience is often but a dull one that gives no trouble when it ought to bark loudest;
A book which one man ought to scorn, may be of elevating tendency to another, because it is a little above his present moral condition.
She seemed to regard every one as of her own family. People were her property—hers to love! And her brain was as active as her heart, and constantly with it. She wanted to know what people thought and felt and imagined; what everything was; how a thing was done, and how it ought to be done.
She knew most of the stars, not by their astronomical names indeed, but by names she had herself given them.
But He is there for them that seek him, not for those who do not look for him. Till they do, all he can do is to make them feel the want of him.
A self-glorious man is the biggest fool in the world.
"I would rather learn to read, though—the right way, I mean—the way that makes one book talk to another."
She knew that people looked down upon men who did things with their hands; but she had done so many things herself with her hands, and been so much obliged to others who could do things with their hands better than she, that she felt the superiority of such whose hands were their own perfect servants, and ready to help others as well.
What is feeling but poetry in a gaseous condition?
"Never mind the church. She's not my mistress, though I am her servant. God is my master,
"I don't believe you. And I won't worship him." "Why, who wants you to worship him? You must be a very different person before he will care much for your worship! You can't worship him while you think him what you do. He is something quite different. You don't know him to love, and you don't know him to worship."
It is difficult to say how much man or woman is the worse for doing, when freed from restraint, what he or she would have been glad to do before, but for the restraint.
an unfaltering church-goer, rigidly decorous in rendering what she imagined God, and knew the clergyman expected, and as rank a mammon-worshipper as any in the land.
amusement was the nearest to sunshine his soul was capable of reaching.
The creator's discipline did not suit his creature's taste, and she would let him know it: whether it suited her necessities, she did not ask or care; she knew nothing of her necessities—only of her desires.
One of four gates stands open to us: to deny the existence of God, and say we can do without him; to acknowledge his existence, but say he is not good, and act as true men resisting a tyrant; to say, "I would there were a God," and be miserable because there is none; or to say there must be a God, and he must be perfect in goodness or he could not be, and give ourselves up to him heart and soul and hands and history.
Now the whole good of things is to be the messengers of love—to carry love from the one heart to the other heart; and when these messengers are fetched instead of sent, grasped at, that is, by a greedy, ungiving hand, they never reach the heart, but block up the path of love, and divide heart from heart; so that the greedy heart forgets the love of the giving heart more and more, and all by the things it gives. That is the way generosity fares with the ungenerous.
That she seemed to avoid being reckoned among church-goers might be a point in her favour!
a shepherd is none the less a true shepherd that he leaves plenty of liberty to the lamb to pick its own food. That its best instincts may not be to the taste either of its natural guardians or the public, is nothing against those instincts.
A man may not be so good as another man, and yet have some good things in him the other has not.
"His bones were black with many a crack, All black and bare, I ween; Jet-black and bare, save where with rust, Of mouldy damps and charnel crust, They were patched with purple and green.
Is that what we were sent here for—to grow honest, I wonder?—Depend upon it," he resumed after a moment's silence, "there's a somewhere where the thing's taken notice of!
"I should like to see the one that made that!" she said at last. "Think of knowing the very person that made that poor pigeon, and has got it now!—and made Miss Brown—and the wind! I must find him! He can't have made me and not care when I ask him to speak to me! You say he is nowhere! I don't believe there is any nowhere, so he can't be there! Some people may be content with things; I shall get tired of them, I know, if I don't get behind them! A thing is nothing without what things it! A gift is nothing without what gives it! Oh, dear! I know what I mean, but I can't say it!"
If I had him to love as I should love one like that, I think I should break my heart with loving him—I should love him to the killing of me! What! all the colours and all the shapes, and all the lights, and all the shadows, and the moon, and the wind, and the water!—and all the creatures—and the people that one would love so if they would let you!—and all—" "And all the pain, and the dying, and the disease, and the wrongs, and the cruelty!"
A generous God—isn't he! If he be anywhere, why don't he let us see him? How can he expect us to believe in him, if he never shows himself? But if he did, why should I worship him for being, or for making me?
To oppose, to refuse, to deny, is not to know the truth, is not to be true any more than it is to be false. Whatever good may lie in the destroying of the false, the best hammer of the iconoclast will not serve withal to carve the celestial form of the Real;
The fact was only this—that the idea of a God worth believing in, was coming a little nearer to him, was becoming to him a little more thinkable.
things that do not seem worth enduring, are not unfrequently the hardest to endure.
Would you allow that thought therefore must yet be interested in its power to produce thought, and might, if it chose, minister to the continuance or enlargement of the power it had originated?"
