A Spoonful of Practical

We live, but a world has passed away With the years that perished to make us men.

And before you know me gone Eternity and I are one.

Christ and the life of Christ is at this moment inspiring the literature of the world as never before, and raising it up a witness against waste and want and war. It may confess Him, as in Tolstoi's work it does, or it may deny Him, but it cannot exclude Him; and in the degree that it ignores His spirit, modern literature is artistically inferior. In other words, all good literature is now Christmas literature.

Yes, what the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.

The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

When one is happy in forgetfulness, facts get forgotten.

"The Civil War is our felt history—history lived in the national imagination," wrote Robert Penn Warren in his Legacy of the Civil War (1961). "Somewhere in their bones," he declared, most Americans have a storehouse of "lessons" drawn from the Civil War. Exactly what those lessons should be, and who should determine them, has been the most contested question in American historical memory since 1863, when Robert E. Lee retreated back into Virginia, Abraham Lincoln went to Gettysburg to explain the meaning of the war, and Frederick Douglass announced "national regeneration" as the "sacred significance" of the war. Among those lessons, wrote Warren, is the realization that "slavery looms up mountainously" in the story, "and cannot be talked away." But Warren acknowledged another lesson of equal importance for Americans of all persuasions: "When one is happy in forgetfulness, facts get forgotten." Or as William Dean Howells once put it: "What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending."

He carries ruins to ruins.

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which the wave is composed, does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation today, next year die, and their experience with them.

To believe your own thought, to believe that which is true for your private heart, is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost,—and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgement.

O my friends, there are resources in us on which we have not drawn.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences  but those of spontaneous love.

These facts have always suggested to man the sublime creed, that the world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will, of one mind; and that one mind is everywhere, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool, active; and whatever opposes that will, is everywhere baulked and baffled, because things are made so, and not otherwise. Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute. It is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he. For all things proceed out of this same spirit, which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the several shores which it washes. All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries; his being shrinks out of all remote channels, he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death.