Sublime

inchoate

When man is doing the three or four things that he was sent on this earth to do, then he speaks like one who shall live for ever.

Nevertheless the main characteristic remains; the sense not merely that God is stronger than man, not merely that God is more secret than man, but that He means more, that He knows better what He is doing, that compared with Him we have something of the vagueness, the unreason, and the vagrancy of the beasts that perish.

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.

The lovers of liberty thought they were leaving it unlimited, when they were only leaving it undefined.

William Morris caressait un rêve similaire : « Il me semble que personne ne se soucie d’améliorer les choses – et moi non plus, vois-tu, en dépit de mes récriminations. Mais, voyons, imaginons des gens qui vivraient dans de petites communautés entourées de jardins et de prés verts, de sorte que l’on puisse se retrouver en pleine campagne après cinq

Our longings for satisfaction get frustrated in discontent. Our longings for significance get frustrated by our own inadequacies. J. R. R. Tolkien diagnoses the roots of our longing: “We all long for [Eden], and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with a sen

The idea of the equality of men is in substance simply the idea of the importance of man.

But I do say, to start with, “What can we do for posterity, except deal fairly with our contemporaries?” Unless a man love his wife whom he has seen, how shall he love his child whom he has not seen?