An operation that eventually kills may be technically successful, and the man may die cured; and so a description of religion thatshowed it to be madness might first show how real and warm it was, so that if it perished, at least it would perish understood.
Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities.
The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.... If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is the spirit.
Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely a vehicle for joy.
The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them
Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular.... Every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and the bias which that revelation gives to life.
One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt, and though a thousand later considerations may overlay and override them, they remain a background and standard for all happiness. If we trace them out we succeed.
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
If clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary matters.
The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken with to themselves.
There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.
To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.
Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
You and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams.
To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.
With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
Docility is the observable half of reason.
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
It would be hard to conceive a system of instincts more nicely adjusted, where the constituents should represent or support one another better. The husband has an interest in protecting the wife, she in serving the husband. The weaker gains in authority and safety, the wilder and more unconcerned finds a help-mate at home to take thought of his daily necessities. Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.
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