Great Throughts Treasury

"And what is its moral proof? We may formulate it thus: Act so that in your own judgment and in the judgment of others you may merit eternity, act so that you may become irreplaceable, act so that you may not merit death. Or perhaps thus: Act as if you were to die tomorrow, but to die in order to survive and be eternalized. The end of morality is to give personal, human finality to the Universe; to discover the finality that belongs to it ? if indeed it has any finality ? and to discover it by acting."

"And why be scandalized by the infallibility of a man, of the Pope? What difference does it make whether it be a book that is infallible ? the Bible, or a society of men ? the Church, or a single man? Does it make any essential change in the rational difficulty? And since the infallibility of a book or of a society of men is not more rational than that of a single man, this supreme offense to the eyes of reason has to be postulated."

"But as far as our own world is concerned, its gradual leveling-down ? or, we might say, its death ? appears to be proved. And how will this process affect the fate of our spirit? Will it wane with the degradation of the energy of our world and return to unconsciousness, or will it grow according as the utilizable energy diminishes and by virtue of the very efforts that it makes to retard this degradation and to dominate Nature? ? for this it is that constitutes the life of the spirit. May it be that consciousness and its extended support are two powers in contraposition, the one growing at the expense of the other?"

"Apart from the fact there is no normal standard of health, nobody has proved that man is necessarily cheerful by nature. And further, man, by the very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is, in comparison with the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Consciousness is a disease."

"Because his wife lived with heart in hand and extended this offer to the air as the world, delivered completely to the present moment as the roses they live in the countryside and the doves of heaven."

"As the great Unitarian preacher Channing pointed out, that in France and Spain there are multitudes who have proceeded from rejecting Popery to absolute atheism, because "the fact is, that false and absurd doctrines, when exposed, have a natural tendency to beget skepticism in those who receive them without reflection. None are so likely to believe too little as those who have begun by believing too much." Here is, indeed, the terrible danger of believing too much. But no! the terrible danger comes from another quarter ? from seeking to believe with the reason and not with the life."

"But if ether is nothing but an hypothesis explanatory of light, air on the other hand, is a thing that is directly felt; and even if it did not enable us to explain the phenomenon of sound, we should nevertheless always be directly aware of it, and above all, of the lack of it in moments of suffocation or air-hunger. And in the same way God Himself, not the idea of God, may become a reality that is immediately felt; and even though the idea of God does not enable us to explain either the existence or essence of the Universe, we have at times the direct feeling of God, above all in moments of spiritual suffocation. And the feeling, mark it well, for all that is tragic in it and the whole tragic sense of life is founded upon this ? this feeling is a feeling of hunger for God, of the lack of God. To believe in God is, in the first instance... to wish that there may be a God, to be unable to live without Him."

"Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory."

"Because Augustus was not a hiker, but a walker of life."

"But Don Quixote was converted. Yes ? and died, poor soul. But the other, the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives among us with his spirit ? this Don Quixote was not converted, this Don Quixote continues to incite us to make ourselves ridiculous, this Don Quixote must never die."

"But our Don Quixote, the inward, the immortal Don Quixote, conscious of his own comicness, does not believe that his doctrines will triumph in this world, because they are not of it. And it is better that they should not triumph. And if the world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retire alone to the mountain, fleeing from the king-making crowds."

"But the truth is that my work ? I was going to say my mission ? is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire."

"Consciousness is participated knowledge, is co-feeling, and co-feeling is com-passion. Love personalizes all that it loves. Only by personalizing it can we fall in love with an idea. And when love is so great and so vital, so strong and so overflowing, that it loves everything, then it personalizes everything and discovers that the total All, that the Universe, is also a person Possessing the Consciousness, the Consciousness Which in its turn suffers, pities, and loves, and is Therefore consciousness. And this Consciousness of the Universe, Which the love, personalizing all that it loves, discovers, is what we call God."

"Consciousness, the craving for more, more, always more, hunger of eternity and thirst of infinity, appetite for God ? these are never satisfied. Each consciousness seeks to be itself and all other consciousnesses without ceasing to be itself; it seeks to be God. And matter, unconsciousness, tends to be less and less, tends to be nothing, its thirst being a thirst for repose. Spirit says: I wish to be! and matter answers: I wish not to be!"

"Disillusion is the sad aftertaste of triumph. No, that was not it. What you said or did was not worth the applause they granted you....A great dejection takes hold of you. No, that was not it. You did not want to do what you did, you did not want to say what you said; they applauded what was not yours. And your wife appears and, overflowing with tenderness at the sight of you sprawled there, she asks you what is wrong, what ails or worries you, and you send her away, perhaps rudely, with a rough, "Leave me in peace!" And you remain at war with yourself."

"But the capacity to enjoy is impossible without the capacity to suffer; and the faculty of enjoyment is one with that of pain. Whosoever does not suffer does not enjoy, just as whosoever is insensible to cold is insensible to heat."

"Calmed a bit, opened the book and resumed reading. Forgot himself completely and could then say well that died. I dreamed the other, or better, the other was a dream that was dreamed it, a creature of his infinite loneliness. Until they woke with a terrible pang in his chest. The character in the book just to tell you once again: Shall I repeat the reader to die with me. '. And this time the effect was amazing. The tragic player lost the knowledge that he lay spiritual suffering; stopped dreaming and the other left to dream himself. And when he came to himself, threw out the book, turned off the light and tried to sleep, stop dreaming. Impossible! From time to time had to get up to drink water, it occurred to him that drank the Seine, in the mirror. 'I'll be mad? - Repeat -. Probably not, because when a person asks if he is mad because he is not ... ' He got up, took his fire in the fireplace and burned the book, then returned to bed. And finally managed to fall asleep."

"Egoism you say? There is nothing more universal than the individual, for what is the property of each is the property of all. Each man is worth more than the whole of humanity, nor will it do to sacrifice each to all save in so far as all sacrifice themselves to each. That which we call egoism is the principle of psychic gravity, the necessary postulate. "Love thy neighbor as thyself," we are told, the presupposition being that each man loves himself; and it is not said "Love thyself." And nevertheless, we do not know how to love ourselves."

"Do people know what faith or perhaps care much."

"Don Quixote made himself ridiculous; but did he know the most tragic ridicule of all, the inward ridicule, the ridiculousness of a man's self to himself, in the eyes of his own soul? Imagine Don Quixote's battlefield to be his own soul; imagine him to be fighting in his soul to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, to preserve the treasure of his infancy; imagine him an inward Don Quixote, with a Sancho at his side, inward and heroic too ? and tell me if you find anything comic in the tragedy."

"Envy is a thousand times worse than hunger, since it is hunger of the spirit."

"Faith makes us live by showing us that life, although it is dependent upon reason, has its well spring and source of power elsewhere, in something supernatural and miraculous. Cournot the mathematician, a man of singularly well-balanced and scientifically equipped mind has said that it is this tendency towards the supernatural and miraculous that gives life, and that when it is lacking, all the speculations of reason lead to nothing but affliction of the spirit. ...And in truth we wish to live."

"Faith feels itself secure neither with universal consent, nor with tradition, nor with authority. It seeks support of its enemy, reason."

"Ether is, in effect, a merely hypothetical entity, valuable only in so far as it explains that which by means of it we endeavor to explain ? light, electricity, or universal gravitation ? and only so far as these facts cannot be explained in any other way. In like manner the idea of God is also an hypothesis, valuable only in so far as it enables us to explain that which by means of it we endeavor to explain ? the essence and existence of the Universe ? and only so long as these cannot be explained in any other way. And since in reality we explain the Universe neither better nor worse with this idea than without it, the idea of God, the supreme petitio principii, is valueless."

"Every peasant has a lawyer inside of him, just as every lawyer, no matter how urbane he may be, carries a peasant within himself."

"Everything in me that conspires to break the unity and continuity of my life conspires to destroy me and consequently to destroy itself. Every individual in a people who conspires to break the spiritual unity and continuity of that people tends to destroy it and to destroy himself as a part of that people."

"Fear is the start of wisdom."

"Feast of All Souls if you ask me how I believe in God, how God creates Himself in me, and reveals Himself to me, my answer may perhaps provoke your smiles or laughter, and even scandalize you. I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath of His affection, feel His invisible and intangible hand drawing me, leading me, grasping me."

"Feeling does not succeed in converting consolation into truth, nor does reason succeed in converting truth into consolation."

"For the mockers are those who die comically, and God laughs at their comic ending, while the nobler part, the part of tragedy, is theirs who endured the mockery."

"For the truth is that our doctrines are usually only the justification a posteriori of our conduct, or else they are our way of trying to explain that conduct to ourselves."

"For what is specific in the Catholic religion is immortalization and not justification, in the Protestant sense. Rather is this latter ethical. It is from Kant, in spite of what orthodox Protestants may think of him, that Protestantism derived its penultimate conclusions ? namely, that religion rests upon morality, and not morality upon religion, as in Catholicism."

"From whatever side the matter is regarded, it is always found that reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts it. And the truth is, in all strictness, that reason is the enemy of life."

"Getting married is not difficult, it is difficult to be married."

"Glorious is the risk! ? glorious is the risk that we are able to run of our souls never dying ? Faced with this risk, I am presented with arguments designed to eliminate it, arguments demonstrating the absurdity of the belief in the immortality of the soul; but these arguments fail to make any impression on me, for they are reasons and nothing more than reasons, and it is not with reasons that the heart is appeased. I do not want to die ? no; I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever. I want this "I" to live ? this poor "I" that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now, and therefore the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own soul, tortures me."

"God was invented to save the world from emptiness."

"God give you peace and if glory!"

"God does not think, He creates; He does not exist, He is eternal, wrote Kierkegaard; but perhaps it is more exact to say with Mazzini, the mystic of the Italian city, that "God is great because his thought is action" (Ai giovani d'Italila), because with Him to think is to create, and He gives existence to that which exists in His thought by the mere fact of thinking it, and the impossible is unthinkable by God. It is not written in the Scriptures that God creates with His word ? that is to say, with His thought ? and that by this, by His Word, He made everything that exists? And what God has once made does He ever forget? May it not be that all the thoughts that have ever passed through the Supreme Consciousness still subsist therein? In Him, who is eternal, is not all existence eternalized?"

"Happiness is a thing that is lived and felt, not a thing that is reasoned about or defined"

"Have you never, in the corridors of the convent which is Spain, run across people sick with acedia who think they are made of glass and cry out wildly and moan if they are touched? Well, I have met many of them. They seem mad; and yet when you get to talking to them and hear them discourse and reason about their ills, you are convinced that they are the wisest people of all because they sense the common madness and express it, and are the sanest because they sense the common infirmity and bemoan it."

"Hegel made famous his aphorism that all the rational is real and all the real rational; but there are many of us who, unconvinced by Hegel, continue to believe that the real, the really real, is irrational, that reason builds upon irrationalities. Hegel, a great framer of definitions, attempted with definitions to reconstruct the universe, like that artillery sergeant who said that cannon were made by taking a hole and enclosing it with steel."

"He who bases or thinks he bases his conduct ? his inward or his outward conduct, his feeling or his action ? upon a dogma or a principle which he deems incontrovertible, runs the risk of becoming a fanatic, and moreover, the moment that this dogma is weakened or shattered, the morality based upon it gives way. If the earth that he thought firm begins to rock, he himself trembles at the earthquake, for we do not all come up to the standard of the ideal Stoic who remains undaunted among the ruins of a world shattered into atoms. Happily the stuff that is underneath a man's ideas will save him. For if a man should tell you that he does not defraud or cuckold his best friend only because he is afraid of hell, you may depend upon it that neither would he do so even if he were to cease to believe in hell, but that he would invent some other excuse instead. And this is all to the honor of the human race."

"I am dreaming? Let me dream, if this dream is my life. Do not awaken me from it. I believe in the immortal origin of this yearning for immortality, which is the very substance of my soul. But do I really believe in it...? And wherefore do you want to be immortal? you ask me, wherefore? Frankly, I do not understand the question, for it is to ask the reason of the reason, the end of the end, the principle of the principle."

"I am the center of my universe, the center of the universe, and in my supreme anguish I cry with Michelet, "Mon moi, ils m'arrachent mon moi!" What is a man profited if he shall gain the world and lose his own soul? (Matt. xvi. 26)."

"He knows everything, absolutely everything. Imagine what an idiot he must be."

"I do not believe in human freedom, and does not believe in freedom is not free."

"I do not understand these men who tell me that the prospect of the yonder side of death has never tormented them, that the thought of their own annihilation never disquiets them. For my part I do not wish to make peace between my heart and my head, between my faith and my reason ? I wish rather that there should be war between them."

"I feel that I have within me a medieval soul, and I believe that the soul of my country is medieval, that it has perforce passed through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolution ? learning from them, yes, but without allowing them to touch the soul, preserving the spiritual inheritance which has come down from what are called the Dark Ages. And Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase of the struggle between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which was the offering of the Middle Ages."

"I have spoken of the forceful sonnets of that tragic Portuguese, Antero de Quental, who died by his own hand. Feeling acutely for the plight of his country on the occasion of the British ultimatum in 1890, he wrote as follows: "An English statesman of the last century, who was also undoubtedly a perspicacious observer and a philosopher, Horace Walpole, said that for those who feel, life is a tragedy, and a comedy for those who think. Very well then, if we are destined to end tragically, we Portuguese, we who feel, we would rather prefer this terrible, but noble destiny to that which is reserved, and perhaps at no very remote future date, for England, the country that thinks and calculates, whose destiny it is to finish miserably and comically." ...we twin-brothers of the Atlantic seaboard have always been distinguished by a certain pedantry of feeling, but there remains a basis of truth underlying this terrible idea ? namely that some peoples, those who put thought above feeling, I should say reason above faith, die comically, while those die tragically who put faith above reason."

"I believe in God because I create God."