George MacDonald

What would you do with the pretended suicides?’ ‘Whip them, for trifling with and trading upon the feelings of their kind.’ ‘Then you would drive them to suicide in earnest.’ 'Then they might be worth something, which they were not before.’ 'We are a great deal too humane for that now-a-days, I fear. We don’t like hurting people.’ 'No. We are infested with a philanthropy which is the offspring of our mammon-worship. But surely our tender mercies are cruel. We don’t like to hang people, however unfit they may be to live amongst their fellows. A weakling pity will petition for the life of the worst murderer—but for what? To keep him alive in a confinement as like their notion of hell as they dare to make it—namely, a place whence all the sweet visitings of the grace of God are withdrawn, and the man has not a chance, so to speak, of growing better. In this hell of theirs they will even pamper his beastly body.’

It is a great privilege to be poor, Peter—one that no man ever coveted, and but a very few have sought to retain, but one that yet many have learned to prize. You must not mistake, however, and imagine it a virtue; it is but a privilege, and one also that, like other privileges, may be terribly misused.

“Afterwards I learned, that the best way to manage some kinds of painful thoughts, is to dare them to do their worst; to let them lie and gnaw at your heart till they are tired; and you find you still have a residue of life they cannot kill.”

“She does not belong by rights to this world at all, but to some other planet, probably Mercury. Her proclivity to her true sphere destroys all the natural influence which this orb would otherwise possess over her corporeal frame. She cares for nothing here. There is no relation between her and this world.”

ed- this is not the perspective of MacDonald; these are words through Kopy-Keck the spiritualist as a comedic foil to Hum-Drum the materialist, both of which are foil to the actual solution.

“Never tell a child ‘you have a soul.’ Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body.”

Via Dolorosa

Life is measured by intensity, not by dial, dropping sand or watch.