Journal: The Journal Intime

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Macmillan, 1887

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Page 327 - ... la prier, La cruelle qu'elle est se bouche les oreilles Et nous laisse crier. Le pauvre en sa cabane, où le chaume le couvre, Est sujet à ses lois; Et la garde qui veille aux barrières du Louvre N'en défend point nos rois. De murmurer contre elle et perdre patience, II est mal à propos; Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule science Qui nous met en repos.
Page 224 - Christianity is above all religious, and religion is not a method, it is a life, a higher and supernatural life, mystical in its root and practical in its fruits, a communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a love which radiates, a force which acts, a happiness which overflows.
Page 28 - He who is silent is forgotten ; he who abstains is taken at his word ; he who does not advance, falls back ; he who stops is overwhelmed, distanced, crushed ; he who ceases to grow greater becomes smaller ; he who leaves off, gives up ; the stationary condition is the beginning of the end — it is the terrible symptom which precedes death.
Page 7 - Whether we will or no, there is an esoteric doctrine — there is a relative revelation; each man enters into God so much as God enters into him ; or, as Angelus, I think, said, " The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees me.
Page 104 - To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.
Page 4 - Never to tire, never to grow cold ; to be patient, sympathetic, tender ; to look for the budding flower and the opening heart ; to hope always, like God ; to love always, — this is duty.
Page 24 - The statistician will register a growing progress, and the moralist a gradual decline: on the one hand, a progress of things; on the other, a decline of souls. The useful will take the place of the beautiful, industry of art, political economy of religion, and arithmetic of poetry.
Page 201 - We must treat our subject brutally, and not be always trembling lest we are doing it a wrong. We must be able to transmute and absorb it into our own substance. This sort of confident effrontery is beyond me : my whole nature tends to that impersonality which respects and subordinates itself to the object ; it is love of truth which holds me back from concluding and deciding.
Page 105 - Alas, whatever one may say or do, wisdom, justice, reason, and goodness will never be anything more than special cases and the heritage of a few elect souls. Moral and intellectual harmony, excellence in all its forms, will always be a rarity of great price, an isolated chef d'ceuvre.
Page 19 - There you have the two worlds : Christianity brings and preaches salvation by the conversion of the will, — humanism by the emancipation of the mind. One attacks the heart, the other the brain. Both wish to enable man to reach his ideal. But the ideal differs, if not by its content, at least by the disposition of its content, by the predominance and sovereignty given to this or that inner power. For one, the mind is the organ of the soul ; for the other, the soul is an inferior state of the mind...

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