“All noble enthusiasms pass through a feverish stage, and grow wiser and more serene.”
William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman
Emancipation (1840)
“Enthusiasm is a supernatural serenity.”
Source: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
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Henry David Thoreau385
1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitio… 1817–1862Related quotes
Layamon (1200) English poet
J. S. P. Tatlock The Legendary History of Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950) p. 485.
Criticism
“If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.”
Vince Lombardi (1913–1970) American football player, coach, and executive
Reported in Lee Green, Sportswit (1984), p. 169.
Jonathan Wells (1942) American intelligent design advocate
Wells testimony, Kansas evolution hearings http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/kansas/kangaroo2.html#p681, 2005.
Michael Moorcock book The Runestaff
Book 1, Chapter 5 “A City of Glowing Shadows” (p. 406)
The Runestaff (1969)
“The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.”
Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer
What Would You Substitute for the Bible as a Moral Guide? (1900)
Context: All “inspired books,” teaching that what the supernatural commands is right, and right because commanded, and that what the supernatural prohibits is wrong, and wrong because prohibited, are absurdly unphilosophic. And all “inspired books,” teaching that only those who obey the commands of the supernatural are, or can be, truly virtuous, and that unquestioning faith will be rewarded with eternal joy, are grossly immoral. Again I say: Intelligence is the only moral guide.
“When a species fixates on the supernatural, it ceases to mature.”
James K. Morrow book Only Begotten Daughter
Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 6 (p. 118)
“I saw no evidence of supernatural ones, alas.”
Elizabeth Hand (1957) American writer
Apocalypse Descending (2002)
Context: Mars Hill was inspired by a real place near where I live on the coast of Maine, a 100+ year old Spiritualist community called Temple Heights: little carpenter's gothic cottages tumbling down a hillside overlooking the sea, very picturesque and, tragically, very susceptible to the terrible development pressure that's bearing down on the small towns around here.
So far, however, the spiritualists seem to be winning out. After I wrote "Last Summer at Mars Hill", I visited the place formally and had a reading done by a psychic there. The place was exactly as I'd imagined it, as were its (human) inhabitants. I saw no evidence of supernatural ones, alas.
“The human being, by his nature, is condemned to the supernatural.”
Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) Swiss philosopher
[2003, Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, World Wisdom, 141, 978-0-94153227-3]
Human being, Specificities