Wisdom and Destiny

This essay on Wisdom and Destiny was to have been a thing of some twenty pages, the work of a fortnight; but the idea took root, others flocked to it, and the volume has occupie...

3. Is it idle to speak of justice, happiness, morals, and all things connected therewith, before the hour of science has sounded--that definitive hour, wherein all that we cling...

15. The statue of destiny casts a huge shadow over the valley, which it seems to enshroud in gloom; but this shadow has clearest outline for such as look down from the mountain....

If aught could discourage the sage--though he is not truly wise whose astonishment is not enlightened, and his interest quickened, by the unforeseen thing that discourages--it w...

37. And thus are we truly saving a man if we bring about that he loves evil somewhat less than he loved it before; for we are helping that man to construct, deep down in his sou...

47. And yet virtue often is chastised, and the advent of misfortune hastened, by the soul's very strength; for the greater our love may be, the greater the surface becomes we ex...

We often see men who are strong and morally prudent whom happiness yet overcomes. Not finding therein all they sought, they do not defend it, or cling to it, with the energy nee...

69. It is not by self-sacrifice that loftiness comes to the soul; but as the soul becomes loftier, sacrifice fades out of sight, as the flowers in the valley disappear from the...

77. Can we conceive a situation in life wherein a man who is truly wise and noble can be made to suffer as profoundly as the man who follows evil? In this world it is far more c...

83. It may be urged that virtue is subject to defeat and disappointment, no less than vice; but the defeats and disappointments of virtue bring with them no gloom or distress, f...

89. Does this mean that the wise man should expect no more from life than other men; that he should love mediocrity and limit his desires; content himself with little and restri...

95. Last night, re-reading Saint-Simon--with whom we seem to ascend a lofty tower, whence our gaze rests on hundreds of human destinies, astir in the valley below--I understood...

101. "No touch of love, no hint of fame, no hours of ease lie for you across the knees of fate," exclaims Miss Mary Robinson, who has chronicled this existence, in a fine outbur...

104. Go where we will, the plentiful river of life flows on, beneath the canopy of heaven. It flows between prison walls, where the sun never gleams on its waters; as it flows b...