Life and Existence

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

 

If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.

 

It is better to have a line drawn somewhere in the penumbra between darkness and light, than to remain in uncertainty.

 

I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.

 

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul.

 

Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire.

 

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

 

Per caputque pedesque .

 

And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always— take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!

 

The tragedy of a man who has found himself out.

 

All children, except one, grow up.

 

If you direct your whole thought to work itself, none of the things which invade eyes or ears will reach the mind.

Old people are a kind of monsters to little folks; mild manifestations of the terrible, it may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged and grooved features, which those horrid little eyes exhaust of their details like so many microscopes, not exactly what human beings ought to be.

[I]n the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists.

All uncertainty is fruitful ... so long as it is accompanied by the wish to understand.

Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling.

There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of mind suffers, as compared with the man of action. While he is talcing an enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he lets his chance slip through his fingers.

We find it hard to get and to keep any private property in thought. Other people are all the time saying the same things we are hoarding to say when we get ready.

Taste is the fundamental quality which sums up all other qualities. It is the ne plus ultra of the intelligence.

Thinking is hard work. One can’t bear burdens and ideas at the same time.

Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.

One has to dismount from an idea, and get into the saddle again, at every parenthesis.

Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull.