“Economic man and the Calvinist Christian sing to each other like voices in a fugue. The Calvinist stands alone before an almost merciless God; no human agency can help him; his church is a means to political and social organization rather than a bridge to deity, for no priest can have greater knowledge of the divine way than he himself; no friend can console him — in fact, he should distrust all men; in the same fashion, Economic Man faces a merciless world alone and unaided, his hand against every other's.”

Source: Matthew Arnold (1939), Ch. 8: The Failure of the Middle Class

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Economic man and the Calvinist Christian sing to each other like voices in a fugue. The Calvinist stands alone before a…" by Lionel Trilling?

Lionel Trilling30

American academic 1905–1975

Related quotes

“No man can feel himself alone
The while he bravely stands
Between the best friends ever known
His two good, honest hands.”

Nixon Waterman (1859–1944) American writer

Interludes, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“A man can stand a lot as long as he can stand himself. He can live without hope, without friends, without books, even without music, as long as he can listen to his own thoughts and to the singing of a bird outside his window and to the far-away voice of the sea.”

Axel Munthe book The Story of San Michele

Preface, 1928
The Story of San Michele (1929)

“Tis a good word and a profitable desire, but withal absurd; for to make the handle bigger than the hand, the cubic longer than the arm, and to hope to stride further than our legs can reach, is both impossible and monstrous; or that man should rise above himself and humanity; for he cannot see but with his eyes, nor seize but with his hold. He shall be exalted, if God will lend him an extraordinary hand; he shall exalt himself, by abandoning and renouncing his own proper means, and by suffering himself to be raised and elevated by means purely celestial. It belongs to our Christian faith, and not to the stoical virtue, to pretend to that divine and miraculous metamorphosis.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 12 : Of Physiognomy
Essais (1595), Book III

“We are so bound together that no man can labor for himself alone. Each blow he strikes in his own behalf helps to mold the Universe.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

"On Getting on in the World".
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

“No man is greater than his will;
No gods to him will lend a hand!
Upon his courage and his skill
The record of his life must stand.
What honors shall befall to him,
What he shall claim of fame or pelf,
Depend not on the favoring whim
Of fortune's god, but on himself.”

Edgar Guest (1881–1959) American writer

Source: Just Folks (1917), There Are No Gods, final stanza.

“It lies not in man's right nor in man's power truly to justify the guilty. This is a miracle reserved for the Lord alone. God, the infinitely just Sovereign, knows that there is not a just man upon earth that doeth good and sinneth not, and therefore, in the infinite sovereignty of His divine nature and in the splendor of His ineffable love, He undertakes the task, not so much of justifying the just as of justifying the ungodly. God has devised ways and means of making the ungodly man to stand justly accepted before Him: He has set up a system by which with perfect justice He can treat the guilty as if he had been all his life free from offence, yea, can treat him as if he were wholly free from sin. He justifieth the ungodly.”

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist

All of Grace

“A man is what he is, not what men say he is. His character no man can touch. His character is what he is before his God and his Judge; and only himself can damage that. His reputation is what men say he is. That can be damaged; but reputation is for time, character is for eternity.”

John Bartholomew Gough (1817–1886) Anglo-American temperance orator

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 46.

“Each one fashions and bears his world with him, and that unless he himself become wise, strong and loving, no change in his circumstances can make him rich or free or happy.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 5

“We ought to esteem him alone an agreeable and good-natured man, who, in his daily intercourse with others, behaves in such a manner as friends usually behave to each other. For as a person of that rustic character appears, wherever he comes, like a mere stranger: so, on the contrary, a polite man, wherever he goes, seems as easy as if he were amongst his intimate friends and acquaintance.”

Giovanni della Casa (1503–1556) Roman Catholic archbishop

Source: Galateo: Or, A Treatise on Politeness and Delicacy of Manners, p. 43

“Each man in his life honors, and imitates as well as he can, that god to whose choir he belonged, while he is uncorrupted in his first incarnation here; and in the fashion he has thus learned, he bears himself to his beloved as well as to the rest. So, then, each chooses from among the beautiful a love conforming to his kind, and then, as if his chosen were his god, he sets him up and robes him for worship.”

Mary Renault book The Charioteer

Phaedrus by Plato, as translated in the novel, p. 104
The Charioteer (1953)

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Lionel Trilling30

Related quotes

Related topics