Through Silence to Realization: Or, The Human Awakening

Front Cover
Elizabeth Towne, 1906 - 190 pages
 

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 65 - Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.
Page 73 - The notions of the beginning and the end of the world entertained by our forefathers are no longer credible. It is very certain that the earth is not the chief body in the material universe, and that the world is not subordinated to man's use. It is even more certain that nature is the expression of a definite order with which nothing interferes, and that the chief business of mankind is to learn that order and govern themselves accordingly.
Page 183 - CEdipus, and Simonides Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers, When each had numbered more than fourscore years, And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten, Had but begun his Characters of Men. Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales, At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales; Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last, Completed Faust when eighty years were pa'st.
Page 184 - What then ? Shall we sit idly down and say The night hath come; it is no longer day ? The night hath not yet come; we are not quite Cut off from labor by the failing light; Something remains for us to do or dare; Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear...
Page 164 - No nobler feeling than this of admiration for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life.
Page 183 - It is too late ! Ah, nothing is too late Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Page 184 - What then? Shall we sit idly down and say The night hath come; it is no longer day? The night hath not yet come; we are not quite Cut off from labor by the failing light...
Page 155 - The present is enough for common souls, Who, never looking forward, are indeed Mere clay wherein the footprints of their age Are petrified forever...
Page 103 - Like shriveled leaves, these worn out creeds Are dropping from Religion's tree; The world begins to know its needs, And souls are crying to be free. Free from the load of fear and grief, Man fashioned in an ignorant age; Free from the ache of unbelief He fled to in rebellious rage. No church can bind him to the things That fed the first crude souls, evolved; For, mounting up on daring wings, He questions mysteries all unsolved.
Page 8 - Hark! the rushing snow! The sun-awakened avalanche! whose mass, Thrice sifted by the storm, had gathered there Flake after flake, in heaven-defying minds As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth Is loosened, and the nations echo round, Shaken to their roots, as do the mountains now.

Bibliographic information