Journal: The Journal Intime, Volume 2

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Macmillian, 1895

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Page 64 - there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance.
Page 283 - On the bed of death the soul should have no eyes but for eternal things. All the littlenesses of life disappear. The fight is over. There should be nothing left now but remembrance of past blessings, — adoration of the ways of God. Our natural instinct leads us back to Christian humility and pity. ' Father, forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them who trespass against us.' Prepare thyself as though the coming Easter were thy last, for thy days henceforward shall be few and evil.
Page 72 - At bottom, everything depends upon the presence or absence of one single element in the soul— hope. All the activity of man, all his efforts and all his enterprises, presuppose a hope in him of attaining an end. Once kill this hope and his movements become senseless, spasmodic, and convulsive, like those of some one falling from a height.
Page 191 - We must treat our subject brutally and not be always trembling lest we should be 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 243 - I cannot bring myself to sympathise with such a way of understanding poetry. The talent shown is astonishing, but stuff and matter are wanting. It is an effort of the imagination to stand alone — a substitute for everything else. We find metaphors, rhymes, music, colour, but not man, not humanity.
Page 311 - This psychological reinvolution is an anticipation of death ; it represents the life beyond the grave, the return to Scheol, the soul fading into the world of ghosts, or descending into the region of Die Mutter ; it implies the simplification of the individual who, allowing all the accidents of personality to evaporate, exists henceforward only in the indivisible state, the state of point, of potentiality, of pregnant nothingness. Is not this the true definition of mind ? is not mind, dissociated...
Page 355 - Emerson has little to say of that horrid burden and impediment on the soul, which the churches call Sin, and which, by whatever name we call it, is a very real catastrophe in the moral nature of man.
Page 103 - ... the same haste and unreason. A succession of opposing follies gives an impression of change which the people readily identify with improvement, as though Enceladus was more at ease on his left side than on his right, the weight of the volcano remaining the same. The stupidity of Demos is only equalled by its presumption. It is like a youth with all his animal and none of his reasoning powers developed. Luther's comparison of humanity to a drunken peasant, always ready to fall from his horse on...
Page 256 - To understand things we must have been once in them and then have come out of them; so that first there must be captivity and then deliverance, illusion followed by disillusion, enthusiasm by disappointment. He who is still under the spell, and he who has never felt the spell, are equally incompetent. We only know well what we have first believed, then judged. To understand we must- be free, yet not have been always free. The same truth holds, whether it is a question of love, of art, of religion,...
Page 244 - ... honesty, and duty. It is an affectation, and because it is an affectation the school is struck with sterility. The reader desires in the poet something better than a juggler in rhyme, or a conjurer in verse ; he looks to find in him a painter of life, a being who thinks, loves, and has a conscience, who feels passion and repentance.

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