Romola, Volume 2

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Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1863 - Florence (Italy) - 310 pages

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Page 310 - I believe, when I first knew him, he never thought of anything cruel or base. But because he tried to slip away from everything that was unpleasant, and cared for nothing else so much as his own safety, he came at last to commit some of the basest deeds — such as make men infamous.
Page 55 - Our lives make a moral tradition for our individual selves as the life of mankind at large makes a moral tradition for the race; and to have once acted nobly seems a reason why we should always be noble. But Tito was feeling the effect of an opposite tradition : he had won no memories of self-conquest and perfect faithfulness from which he could have a sense of falling.
Page 65 - And you are flying from your debts, — the debt of a Florentine woman, the debt of a wife. You are turning your back on the lot that has been appointed for you ; you are going to choose another. But can man or woman choose duties ? No more than they can choose their birthplace or their father and mother. My daughter, you are fleeing from the presence of God into the wilderness.
Page 185 - She felt that the sanctity attached to all close relations, and, therefore, pre-eminently to the closest, was but the expression in outward law of that result towards which all human goodness and nobleness must spontaneously tend; that the light abandonment of ties, whether inherited or voluntary, because they had ceased to be pleasant, was the uprooting of social and personal virtue.
Page 211 - There was a moment's pause. Then Savonarola said, with keener emotion than he had yet shown — "Be thankful, my daughter, if your own soul has been spared perplexity; and judge not those to whom a harder lot has been given. You see one ground of action in this matter. I see many. I have to choose that which will further the work intrusted to me.
Page 71 - I did not suppose he was a malefactor. I meant, that if he were a malefactor, your place would be in the prison beside him. My daughter, if the cross comes to you as a wife, you must carry it as a wife. You may say, 'I will forsake my husband,' but you cannot cease to be a wife.
Page 284 - ... after she had been sent over the sea to help them in their extremity, and how the queer little black Benedetto used to crawl about the straw by her side and want everything that was brought to her, and she always gave him a bit of what she took, and told them if they loved her they must be good to Benedetto. Many legends were afterwards told in that valley about the blessed lady who came over the sea, but they were legends by which all who heard might know that in times gone by a woman had done...
Page 309 - And so, my Lillo, if you mean to act nobly and seek to know the best things God has put within reach of men, you must learn to fix your mind on that end, and not on what will happen to you because of it.
Page 226 - His faith wavered, but not his speech : it is the lot of every man who has to speak for the satisfaction of the crowd, that ho must often speak in virtue of yesterday's •faith, hoping it will come back tomorrow.
Page 309 - We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thought, and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves ; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good.

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