Source: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. XV : The Need of a God, p. 218.
Context: If I can reconcile myself to the certainty of death only by forgetting it, I am not happy. And if I can dispose of the fact of human misery about me only by shutting my thoughts as well as myself within my comfortable garden, I may assure myself that I am happy, but I am not. There is a skeleton in the closet of the universe, and I may at any moment be in the face of it. Happiness is inseparable from confidence in action; and confidence of action is inseparable from what the schoolmen called peace -- that is, poise of mind with reference to everything I may possibly encounter in the chances of fortune.
Now this perfect openness to experience is not possible if pain is the last word of pain. Unless there is something behind the fact of pain, some kind of mystery or problem in it whose solution shows the pain to be other than what it pretends, there is no happiness for man in this world or the next; for no matter how fair the world might in time become, the fact that it had been as bad as it is would remain an unbanishable misery, unbanishable by God or any other power.
“Great God, I ask thee for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye.”
Prayer http://www.walden.org/Institute/thoreau/writings/poetry/Great%20God.htm, st. 1 (1842)
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Henry David Thoreau 385
1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitio… 1817–1862Related quotes
Source: The Greatest Salesman in the World (1968), Ch. 16 : The Scroll Marked IX, p. 95.
“My son, I caution you to keep
The middle way, for if your pinions dip
Too low the waters may impede your flight;
And if they soar too high the sun may scorch them.
Fly midway.”
Insruit et natum: Medioque ut limite curras,
Icare, ait, moneo. Ne, si demissior ibis,
Unda gravet pennas; si celsior, ignis adurat.
Inter utrumque vola.
Book VIII, lines 203–206; translation by Brooks More
Metamorphoses (Transformations)
Dispatches and Letters of Horatio Nelson : a diary entry on the eve of the battle of Trafalgar
The Battle of Trafalgar (1805)
America, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“It may be yet the Gods will have me glad!
Yet, Love, I would that thee and pain I had!”
"The Death of Paris".
The Earthly Paradise (1868-70)
Context: Forgetfulness of grief I yet may gain;
In some wise may come ending to my pain;
It may be yet the Gods will have me glad!
Yet, Love, I would that thee and pain I had!
The First Revelation, Chapter 5
Context: Also our Lord God shewed that it is full great pleasance to Him that a helpless soul come to Him simply and plainly and homely. For this is the natural yearnings of the soul, by the touching of the Holy Ghost (as by the understanding that I have in this Shewing): God, of Thy Goodness, give me Thyself: for Thou art enough to me, and I may nothing ask that is less that may be full worship to Thee; and if I ask anything that is less, ever me wanteth, — but only in Thee I have all.
And these words are full lovely to the soul, and full near touch they the will of God and His Goodness. For His Goodness comprehendeth all His creatures and all His blessed works, and overpasseth without end. For He is the endlessness, and He hath made us only to Himself, and restored us by His blessed Passion, and keepeth us in His blessed love; and all this of His Goodness.
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 173.
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