What Will Get Us Ready (1944)
Context: Most persons are awakened and set on their new track of life through the quickening and kindling power of some person who becomes for them the instrument of inspiration and of the creation of faith and the vision of a nobler way of life. Persons are set on fire by someone who is already aflame. It is a trumpet call to high adventure that starts the forward movements away from old forms.
That is one of the greatest stories in the long history of religion. It was through a long and wonderful circuit of souls, in a succession of forerunners, that the kindling idea of “Something of God in the soul of man” came to George Fox.
“Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started.”
The Myths We Live By (2003).
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Mary Midgley 42
British philosopher and ethicist 1919–2018Related quotes
As quoted in Musician (1993-10).
Interviews (1989-1994), Print
Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Source: The Secret Life of Bees
Athenäumsfragmente 414
Variant translations:
People who are eccentric enough to be quite seriously virtuous understand each other everywhere, discover each other easily, and form a silent opposition to the ruling immorality that happens to pass for morality.
Philosophical Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991) § 414
Athenäum (1798 - 1800)
Context: If there is an invisible church, then it is of the great paradox, which is inseparable from morality, and which must be distinguished from the merely philosophical. People who are so eccentric that they are completely serious in being and becoming virtuous understand one another in everything, find one another easily, and form a silent opposition against the prevailing immorality that pretends to be morality. A certain mysticism of expression, which joined with romantic fantasy and grammatical understanding, can be something charming and good, often serves as a symbol of their beautiful secrets.
“It was one thing to decide to go to West Point, another to get there.”
Source: Swords and Plowshares (1972), p. 23
“Life complete, is lived in two worlds; the one inside, and the one outside.”
Confessions Of A Sceptic
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: Life complete, is lived in two worlds; the one inside, and the one outside. The first half of our days is spent wholly in the former; the second, if it is what it ought to be, wholly in the latter — till our education is almost finished; theories are only words to us, and church controversy is not of things but of shadows of things. Through all that time life and thought beyond our own experience is but a great game played out by book actors; we do not think, we only think we think, and we have been too busy in our own line to have a notion really of what is beyond it. But while so much of our talk is so unreal, our own selves, our own risings, fallings, aspirings, resolutions, misgivings, these are real enough to us; these are our hidden life, our sanctuary of our own mysteries.