Moving the Mountain quotes

It involves no other change than a change of mind, the mere awakening of people, especially the women, to existing possibilities. It indicates what people might do, real people, now living, in thirty years—if they would.

One man, truly aroused and redirecting his energies, can change his whole life in thirty years.

Even the convict who survives thirty years imprisonment, may return at length to the same kind of world he had left so long.

But I! It was as if I had slept, and, in my sleep, they had stolen my world.

I threw off the thought, and started in to action.

John, dear, please remember that the new people in the new world find it ‘like home’ and love it far better than we used to. It’ll be queer to you, but it’s a pleasant commonplace to them.

We have found out at last that it is natural to be happy.

”

“Not at all,” said my sister. “It is afternoon.”

“It is afternoon,” she repeated. “Let that sink in!”

“Do you mean that no one works in the afternoon?”

“Oh, how good of him!” she cried. “I never dreamed they’d be here!”

“Nellie,” said I sternly. “You never told me you were married!”

“Why should I?” she asked innocently. “You never asked me.”

“Nellie,” said I sternly. “You never told me you were married!”

“Why should I?” she asked innocently. “You never asked me.”

I had not. I had seen that she signed her name “Ellen Robertson,” and I knew she was president of a college—how could I imagine her married.

If society has a right to take human life, why has it not a right to improve it? No, my dear man,” continued Owen (he was evidently launched on his specialty now) “society is not somebody else domineering over us!

Society is us⁠—taking care of ourselves.

”

“Yes, he can; but it costs too much.

Men like tobacco, but they like love better, old man.

”

“That was the greatest, the most sudden, the most vital of our changes, sir—the change in the world’s thought!

Ideas are the real things, sir! Brick and mortar? Bah!

We can put brick and mortar in any shape we choose—but we have to choose first! What held the old world back was not facts—not conditions—not any material limitations, or psychic limitations either.

What held the old world back was not facts—not conditions—not any material limitations, or psychic limitations either. We had every constituent of human happiness, sir—except the sense to use them. The channel of progress was obstructed with a deposit of prehistoric ideas.

We choked up our children’s minds with this mental refuse as we choked our rivers and harbors with material refuse, sir.

”

“They look as busy as a lot of ants on an ant heap,” I said.

“It’s their heap, you see,” Owen answered. “And they are not tired⁠—that makes a great difference.”

“They seem phenomenally well dressed—looks like a scene in an opera. Sort of agricultural uniform?”

“Have the men of today no pride?” I asked. “How can you stand it—being treated as inferiors—by women?”

“Women stood it for ten thousand years,” he answered, “being treated as inferiors⁠—by men.”

We went home in silence.

The airships did make a difference. To look down on the flowing, outspread miles beneath gave a sense of the unity and continuous beauty of our country, quite different from the streak views we used to get.

An airship is a moving mountaintop.

The cities were even more strikingly beautiful, in that the change was greater, the contrast sharper.

Big, sturdy, blooming creatures, boys and girls alike, swift and graceful, eager, happy, courteous—I supposed at first that these were the children of exceptionally placed people; but soon found, with a heart-stirring sort of shock, that all the children were like that.

Some of the old folk still carried the scars of earlier conditions, but the children were new people.

Then of my own accord I demanded reasons. Nellie laughed sweetly.

“

They have never been frightened, John.

They have never been told any of those awful things we used to tell them. There is no struggle with churchgoing, no gagging over doctrines, no mysterious queer mess—only life. Life is now open to our children, clear, brilliant, satisfying, and yet stimulating.

I am wandering far ahead of that day’s conversation, but it led to wide study among children, analysis, and some interesting conclusions. When I hit on this one I began to understand.

Children were universally respected, and they liked it.

In city or country, place was made for them, permanent, pleasant, properly appointed place; to use, enjoy, and grow up in. They had their homes and families as before, losing nothing;

“None. Never any more. Did you never hear ‘a burnt child dreads the fire’? We said that, but we never had sense enough to use it.

No proverb ever said ‘a whipped child dreads the fire’!

We never safeguarded them, and the poor little things were always getting burned to death in our barbarous ‘homes’!”

“Yes, of course. Oh, I see! What you meant by necessity was hunger and cold.

Bless you, John, poverty was no spur. It was a deadly anaesthetic.

”

“

The intelligence of a Lord Chancellor didn’t prevent his wearing a wig!

How did people break loose from the force of fashion, I want to know?”

“One of these new doctors got hold of me, when I was about as near the bottom as one can go and get back.

Not a priest with a formula, nor a reformer with an exhortation; but a real physician, a soul-doctor, with a passionate enthusiasm for an interesting case.

That’s what I was, John; not a lost soul; not even a ‘sinner’—just ‘a case.’ Have you heard about these moral sanitariums?”

The idea is worked into our new educational literature—and all our literature for that matter. We see human life as a continuous whole now. People are only temporary parts of it.

Dying isn’t any more trouble than being born.

“People feared death, originally, because it hurt; being chased and eaten was not pleasant. But natural dying does not hurt. Then they were made to fear it by the hell-school of religions. All that is gone by. Our religion rests on life.”

“

We don’t have evil tendencies, John⁠—and never did. We have earlier and later tendencies; and it is perfectly possible to show the child which is which.

”

Also it is good outside too, remember. Life is good, pleasant, easy. Why on earth should a man want to prowl around at night and steal when he can have all he wants, with less effort, in the daytime?

Happy people do not become criminals.

“But I can tell you what treatment like that does to one. It gives a man a new view of human life, of what it is he belongs to.

“Of a lot of things we deeply believed—that were not so! That is what was the matter with us, John. Our minds were full of what Mrs. Eddy christened error.

I wish I could make you feel what a sunrise it was to the world when we left off believing lies and learned the facts.

”

“Easily. It is all ‘lay’ enough. We don’t make a separate profession of religion, or a separate science of ethics.

Ethics is social hygiene⁠—it teaches how humanity must live in order to be well and strong.

We show the child the patent facts of social relation, how all our daily life, our accumulated wealth and beauty and continuing power, rests on common action, on what people do together. Everything about him teaches that.

“That clean, safe, beautiful power was always here, John—but we had not learned of it. The power of wind and water and steam were here—before we learned to use them.

All this splendid power of human life was here⁠—only we did not know it.

”

But the more I saw of all these new advantages, the more I was obliged to admit that they were advantages; the more I traveled and read and learned, the more lonesome and homesick I became.

It was a beautiful world, but it was not my world.

It was like a beautiful dream, but seemed a dream nevertheless. I could no longer dispute that it was possible for people to be “healthy, wealthy and wise”; and happy, too—visibly happy—here they all were; working and playing and enjoying life as naturally as possible.

I wanted to see some neglected-looking land, some ragged suburbs, some faraway farmhouse alone under its big elms, with its own barns in odorous proximity, its own cows, boy-driven, running and stumbling home to be milked.

I wanted a newspaper which gave me the excitement of guessing what the truth was, I wanted to see some foolish, crazily dressed, giggling girls, and equally foolish boys, but better dressed and less giggling, given to cigarettes and uproarious “good times.”

I was homesick, desperately homesick. So without saying a word to anyone I betook myself to old Slide-face, to see Uncle Jake.