Sesame and Lilies quotes

Perhaps you may be proud. Well, we can get much good out of pride, if only it be not religious.

Perhaps you may be vain; it is highly probable; and very pleasant for the people who like to praise you.

Perhaps you are a little envious: that is really very shocking; but then—so is everybody else. Perhaps, also, you are a little malicious, which I am truly concerned to hear, but should probably only the more, if I knew you, enjoy your conversation.

“Work while you have light,” especially while you have the light of morning.

There are few things more wonderful to me than that old people never tell young ones how precious their youth is.

They sometimes sentimentally regret their own earlier days; sometimes prudently forget them; often foolishly rebuke the young, often more foolishly indulge, often most foolishly thwart and restrain; but scarcely ever warn or watch them.

The seaman does not commonly desire to be made captain only because he knows he can manage the ship better than any other sailor on board.

He wants to be made captain that he may be called captain.

The clergyman does not usually want to be made a bishop only because he believes that no other hand can, as firmly as his, direct the diocese through its difficulties. He wants to be made bishop primarily that he may be called “My Lord.”

This, then, being the main idea of “advancement in life,” the force of it applies, for all of us, according to our station, particularly to that secondary result of such advancement which we call “getting into good society.”

We want to get into good society, not that we may have it, but that we may be seen in it; and our notion of its goodness depends primarily on its conspicuousness.

Will you pardon me if I pause for a moment to put what I fear you may think an impertinent question? I never can go on with an address unless I feel, or know, that my audience are either with me or against me:

Yet I admit that this motive does influence you, so far as you prefer those rapid and ephemeral writings to slow and enduring writings—books, properly so called.

For all books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

Mark this distinction—it is not one of quality only. It is not merely the bad book that does not last, and the good one that does. It is a distinction of species. There are good books for the hour, and good ones for all time;

… or which tells you that amusing story, or gives you the real circumstances of such and such events, however valuable for occasional reference, may not be, in the real sense of the word, a “book” at all, nor, in the real sense, to be “read.”

A book is essentially not a talking thing, but a written thing; and written, not with a view of mere communication, but of permanence.

The book of talk is printed only because its author cannot speak to thousands of people at once; if he could, he would—the volume is mere multiplication of his voice. You cannot talk to your friend in India; if you could, you would;

Pass. Do you ask to be the companion of nobles? Make yourself noble, and you shall be. Do you long for the conversation of the wise? Learn to understand it, and you shall hear it. But on other terms?—no.

If you will not rise to us, we cannot stoop to you.

The living lord may assume courtesy, the living philosopher explain his thought to you with considerate pain; but here we neither feign nor interpret;

Do not think it.

Great men do not play stage tricks with the doctrines of life and death: only little men do that.

Milton means what he says; and means it with his might too—is going to put the whole strength of his spirit presently into the saying of it. For though not a lover of false bishops, he was a lover of true ones;

A “Pastor” means “a person who feeds.”

The most unbishoply character a man can have is therefore to be Blind.

The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be fed,—to be a Mouth.

Passion, or “sensation.” I am not afraid of the word; still less of the thing. You have heard many outcries against sensation lately; but, I can tell you, it is not less sensation we want, but more.

The ennobling difference between one man and another,—between one animal and another,—is precisely in this, that one feels more than another.

If we were sponges, perhaps sensation might not be easily got for us; if we were earth-worms, liable at every instant to be cut in two by the spade, perhaps too much sensation might not be good for us.

that tact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the pure woman has above all creatures;—fineness and fulness of sensation, beyond reason;—the guide and sanctifier of reason itself.

Reason can but determine what is true:—it is the God-given passion of humanity which alone can recognise what God has made good.

We come then to that great concourse of the Dead, not merely to know from them what is True, but chiefly to feel with them what is just. Now, to feel with them, we must be like them;

(IV.) You have despised Nature; that is to say, all the deep and sacred sensations of natural scenery.

The French revolutionists made stables of the cathedrals of France; you have made race-courses of the cathedrals of the earth.

Your one conception of pleasure is to drive in railroad carriages round their aisles, and eat off their altars. [16] You have put a railroad-bridge over the falls of Schaffhausen. You have tunnelled the cliffs of Lucerne by Tell’s chapel;

This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors respecting her who was made to be the helpmate of man.

As if he could be helped effectively by a shadow, or worthily by a slave!

Let us try, then, whether we cannot get at some clear and harmonious idea (it must be harmonious if it is true) of what womanly mind and virtue are in power and office, with respect to man’s;

Note broadly in the outset,

Shakespeare has no heroes;—he has only heroines.

There is not one entirely heroic figure in all his plays, except the slight sketch of Henry the Fifth, exaggerated for the purposes of the stage; and the still slighter Valentine in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

and from the joining of this with that yet more majestic childishness, which is still full of change and promise;—opening always—modest at once, and bright, with hope of better things to be won, and to be bestowed.

There is no old age where there is still that promise.

Thus, then, you have first to mould her physical frame, and then, as the strength she gains will permit you, to fill and temper her mind with all knowledge and thoughts which tend to confirm its natural instincts of justice, and refine its natural tact …

… there is just this difference between the making of a girl’s character and a boy’s—you may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of bronze.

But you cannot hammer a girl into anything.

She grows as a flower does,—she will wither without sun; she will decay in her sheath, as a narcissus will, if you do not give her air enough;

“Her household motions light and free And steps of virgin liberty.”

Let her loose in the library, I say, as you do a fawn in a field.

It knows the bad weeds twenty times better than you; and the good ones too, and will eat some bitter and prickly ones, good for it, which you had not the slightest thought would have been so.

And not only in the material and in the course, but yet more earnestly in the spirit of it, let a girl’s education be as serious as a boy’s.

You bring up your girls as if they were meant for sideboard ornaments, and then complain of their frivolity.

Give them the same advantages that you give their brothers—appeal to the same grand instincts of virtue in them;

and the only softness to their feet will be of snow. But it is not thus intended they should believe; there is a better meaning in that old custom.

The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers; but they rise behind her steps, not before them.

“Her feet have touched the meadows, and left the daisies rosy.”

But the effect of failure upon my own mind has been just the reverse of this.

The more that my life disappointed me, the more solemn and wonderful it became to me.

It seemed, contrarily to Pope’s saying, that the vanity of it was indeed given in vain; but that there was something behind the veil of it, which was not vanity. It became to me not a painted cloud, but a terrible and impenetrable one:

I must have as many as you before I leave the house, or I cannot possibly go home in peace.” At last, they made so much noise that I awoke, and thought to myself, “What a false dream that is, of children!”

The child is the father of the man; and wiser. Children never do such foolish things. Only men do.

But there is yet one last class of persons to be interrogated. The wise religious men we have asked in vain; the wise contemplative men, in vain; the wise worldly men, in vain. But there is another group yet.

No true painter ever speaks, or ever has spoken, much of his art. The greatest speak nothing. Even Reynolds is no exception, for he wrote of all that he could not himself do, and was utterly silent respecting all that he himself did.

The moment a man can really do his work he becomes speechless about it.

All words become idle to him—all theories.

The moment a man can really do his work he becomes speechless about it. All words become idle to him—all theories.

Does a bird need to theorize about building its nest, or boast of it when built?

All good work is essentially done that way—without hesitation, without difficulty, without boasting;

Some day, you believe, within these five, or ten, or twenty years, for every one of us the judgment will be set, and the books opened. If that be true, far more than that must be true. Is there but one day of judgment?

Why, for us every day is a day of judgment—every day is a Dies Iræ, and writes its irrevocable verdict in the flame of its West.

Think you that judgment waits till the doors of the grave are opened? It waits at the doors of your houses—it waits at the corners of your streets;

that is to say, we keep a certain number of clowns digging and ditching, and generally stupefied, in order that we, being fed gratis, may have all the thinking and feeling to ourselves.

Yet there is a great deal to be said for this.

A highly-bred and trained English, French, Austrian, or Italian gentleman (much more a lady), is a great production,—a better production than most statues; being beautifully coloured as well as shaped, and plus all the brains;

[15]

That was our real idea of “Free Trade”—“All the trade to myself.”

You find now that by “competition” other people can manage to sell something as well as you—and now we call for Protection again. Wretches!

[20]

Please observe this statement, and think of it, and consider how it happens that a poor old woman will be ashamed to take a shilling a week from the country—but no one is ashamed to take a pension of a thousand a year.

[21] I am heartily glad to see such a paper as the ‘Pall Mall Gazette’ established;