Quotes4study

At the time of Yefim Petrovitch's death Alyosha had two more years to complete at the provincial gymnasium. The inconsolable widow went almost immediately after his death for a long visit to Italy with her whole family, which consisted only of women and girls. Alyosha went to live in the house of two distant relations of Yefim Petrovitch, ladies whom he had never seen before. On what terms he lived with them he did not know himself. It was very characteristic of him, indeed, that he never cared at whose expense he was living. In that respect he was a striking contrast to his elder brother Ivan, who struggled with poverty for his first two years in the university, maintained himself by his own efforts, and had from childhood been bitterly conscious of living at the expense of his benefactor. But this strange trait in Alyosha's character must not, I think, be criticized too severely, for at the slightest acquaintance with him any one would have perceived that Alyosha was one of those youths, almost of the type of religious enthusiast, who, if they were suddenly to come into possession of a large fortune, would not hesitate to give it away for the asking, either for good works or perhaps to a clever rogue. In general he seemed scarcely to know the value of money, not, of course, in a literal sense. When he was given pocket-money, which he never asked for, he was either terribly careless of it so that it was gone in a moment, or he kept it for weeks together, not knowing what to do with it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky     The Brothers Karamazov

"The idea that it is not worth while living for a few weeks took possession of me a month ago, when I was told that I had four weeks to live, but only partially so at that time. The idea quite overmastered me three days since, that evening at Pavlofsk. The first time that I felt really impressed with this thought was on the terrace at the prince's, at the very moment when I had taken it into my head to make a last trial of life. I wanted to see people and trees (I believe I said so myself), I got excited, I maintained Burdovsky's rights, 'my neighbour!'--I dreamt that one and all would open their arms, and embrace me, that there would be an indescribable exchange of forgiveness between us all! In a word, I behaved like a fool, and then, at that very same instant, I felt my 'last conviction.' I ask myself now how I could have waited six months for that conviction! I knew that I had a disease that spares no one, and I really had no illusions; but the more I realized my condition, the more I clung to life; I wanted to live at any price. I confess I might well have resented that blind, deaf fate, which, with no apparent reason, seemed to have decided to crush me like a fly; but why did I not stop at resentment? Why did I begin to live, knowing that it was not worthwhile to begin? Why did I attempt to do what I knew to be an impossibility? And yet I could not even read a book to the end; I had given up reading. What is the good of reading, what is the good of learning anything, for just six months? That thought has made me throw aside a book more than once.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky     The Idiot

"He said that those five minutes seemed to him to be a most interminable period, an enormous wealth of time; he seemed to be living, in these minutes, so many lives that there was no need as yet to think of that last moment, so that he made several arrangements, dividing up the time into portions--one for saying farewell to his companions, two minutes for that; then a couple more for thinking over his own life and career and all about himself; and another minute for a last look around. He remembered having divided his time like this quite well. While saying good-bye to his friends he recollected asking one of them some very usual everyday question, and being much interested in the answer. Then having bade farewell, he embarked upon those two minutes which he had allotted to looking into himself; he knew beforehand what he was going to think about. He wished to put it to himself as quickly and clearly as possible, that here was he, a living, thinking man, and that in three minutes he would be nobody; or if somebody or something, then what and where? He thought he would decide this question once for all in these last three minutes. A little way off there stood a church, and its gilded spire glittered in the sun. He remembered staring stubbornly at this spire, and at the rays of light sparkling from it. He could not tear his eyes from these rays of light; he got the idea that these rays were his new nature, and that in three minutes he would become one of them, amalgamated somehow with them.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky     The Idiot

When Fantine saw that she was making her living, she felt joyful for a moment. To live honestly by her own labor, what mercy from heaven! The taste for work had really returned to her. She bought a looking-glass, took pleasure in surveying in it her youth, her beautiful hair, her fine teeth; she forgot many things; she thought only of Cosette and of the possible future, and was almost happy. She hired a little room and furnished on credit on the strength of her future work--a lingering trace of her improvident ways. As she was not able to say that she was married she took good care, as we have seen, not to mention her little girl.

Victor Hugo     Les Miserables

1. _Letters of St Paul._--In the order of chronology we must give the first place to the earliest letters of St Paul. The first piece of Christian literature which has an independent existence and to which we can fix a date is St Paul's first Epistle to the Thessalonians. Lightfoot dates it in 52 or 53; Harnack places it five years earlier. We may say, then, that it was written some twenty years after the Crucifixion. St Paul is not an historian; he is not attempting to describe what Jesus Christ said or did. He is writing a letter to encourage a little Christian society which he, a Jew, had founded in a distant Greek city; and he reminds his readers of many things which he had told them when he was with them. The evidence, to be collected from his epistles generally must not detain us here, but we may glance for a moment at this one letter, because it contains what appears to be the first mention of Jesus Christ in the literature of the world. Those who would get a true history cannot afford to neglect their earliest documents. Now the opening sentence of this letter is as follows: "Paul and Silvanus and Timothy to the Church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ: Grace to you, and peace." Three men with Greek or Latin names are writing to some kind of assembly in a city of Macedonia. The writers are Jews, to judge by their salutation of "peace," and by their mention of "God the Father," and of the assembly or society as being "in" Him. But what is this new name which is placed side by side with the Divine Name--"in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ"? An educated Greek, who knew something (as many at that time did) of the Greek translation of the ancient Hebrew Scriptures, if he had picked up this letter before he had ever heard the name of Jesus Christ, would have been deeply interested in these opening words. He would have known that "Jesus" was the Greek form of Joshua; that "Christ" was the Greek rendering of Messiah, or Anointed, the title of the great King for whom the Jews were looking; he might further have remembered that "the Lord" is the expression which the Greek Old Testament constantly uses instead of the ineffable name of God, which we now call "Jehovah" (q.v.). Who, then, he might well ask is this Jesus Christ who is lifted to this unexampled height? For it is plain that Jesus Christ stands in some close relation to "God the Father," and that on the ground of that relation a society has been built up, apparently by Jews, in a Greek city far distant from Palestine. He would learn something as he read on; for the letter makes a passing reference to the foundation of the society, and to the expansion of its influence in other parts of Greece; to the conversion of its members from heathenism, and to the consequent sufferings at the hands of their heathen neighbours. The writers speak of themselves as "apostles," or messengers, of Christ; they refer to similar societies "in Christ Jesus," which they call "churches of God," in Judaea, and they say that these also suffer from the Jews there, who had "killed the Lord Jesus" some time before. But they further speak of Jesus as "raised from the dead," and they refer to the belief which they had led the society to entertain, that He would come again "from heaven to deliver them from the coming wrath." Moreover, they urge them not to grieve for certain members of the society who have already died, saying that, "if we believe that Jesus died and rose again," we may also be assured that "the dead in Christ will rise" and will live for ever with Him. Thus the letter assumes that its readers already have considerable knowledge as to "the Lord Jesus Christ," and as to His relation to "God the Father," a knowledge derived from teaching given in person on a former visit. The purpose of the letter is not to give information as to the past, but to stimulate its readers to perseverance by giving fresh teaching as to the future. Historically it is of great value as showing how widely within twenty or twenty-five years of the Crucifixion a religion which proclaimed developed theological teaching as to "the Lord Jesus Christ" had spread in the Roman Empire. We may draw a further conclusion from this and other letters of St Paul before we go on. St Paul's missionary work must have created a demand. Those who had heard him and read his letters would want to know more than he had told them of the earthly life of the Lord Jesus. They would wish to be able to picture Him to their minds; and especially to understand what could have led to His being put to death by the Romans at the requisition of the Jews. St Paul had not been one of his personal disciples in Galilee or Jerusalem; he had no memories to relate of His miracles and teaching. Some written account of these was an obvious need. And we may be sure that any such narrative concerning One who was so deeply reverenced would be most carefully scrutinized at a time when many were still living whose memories went back to the period of Our Lord's public ministry. One such narrative we now proceed to describe. Entry: 1

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 15, Slice 3 "Japan" (part) to "Jeveros"     1910-1911

Primitive ideas on the subject of the soul, and at the same time the origin of them, are best illustrated by an analysis of the terms applied to it. Readers of Dante know the idea that the dead have no shadows; this was no invention of the poet's but a piece of traditionary lore; at the present day among the Basutos it is held that a man walking by the brink of a river may lose his life if his shadow falls on the water, for a crocodile may seize it and draw him in; in Tasmania, North and South America and classical Europe is found the conception that the soul--[Greek: skia], _umbra_--is somehow identical with the shadow of a man. More familiar to the Anglo-Saxon race is the connexion between the soul and the breath; this identification is found both in Aryan and Semitic languages; in Latin we have _spiritus_, in Greek _pneuma_, in Hebrew _ruach_; and the idea is found extending downwards to the lowest planes of culture in Australia, America and Asia. For some of the Red Indians the Roman custom of receiving the breath of a dying man was no mere pious duty but a means of ensuring that his soul was transferred to a new body. Other familiar conceptions identify the soul with the liver (see OMEN) or the heart, with the reflected figure seen in the pupil of the eye, and with the blood. Although the soul is often distinguished from the vital principle, there are many cases in which a state of unconsciousness is explained as due to the absence of the soul; in South Australia _wilyamarraba_ (without soul) is the word used for insensible. So too the autohypnotic trance of the magician or _shaman_ is regarded as due to his visit to distant regions or the nether world, of which he brings back an account. Telepathy or clairvoyance (_q.v._), with or without trance, must have operated powerfully to produce a conviction of the dual nature of man, for it seems probable that facts unknown to the automatist are sometimes discovered by means of crystal-gazing (_q.v._), which is widely found among savages, as among civilized peoples. Sickness is often explained as due to the absence of the soul; and means are sometimes taken to lure back the wandering soul; when a Chinese is at the point of death and his soul is supposed to have already left his body, the patient's coat is held up on a long bamboo while a priest endeavours to bring the departed spirit back into the coat by means of incantations. If the bamboo begins to turn round in the hands of the relative who is deputed to hold it, it is regarded as a sign that the soul of the moribund has returned (see AUTOMATISM). More important perhaps than all these phenomena, because more regular and normal, was the daily period of sleep with its frequent concomitant of fitful and incoherent ideas and images. The mere immobility of the body was sufficient to show that its state was not identical with that of waking; when, in addition, the sleeper awoke to give an account of visits to distant lands, from which, as modern psychical investigations suggest, he may even have brought back veridical details, the conclusion must have been irresistible that in sleep something journeyed forth, which was not the body. In a minor degree revival of memory during sleep and similar phenomena of the sub-conscious life may have contributed to the same result. Dreams are sometimes explained by savages as journeys performed by the sleeper, sometimes as visits paid by other persons, by animals or objects to him; hallucinations, possibly more frequent in the lower stages of culture, must have contributed to fortify this interpretation, and the animistic theory in general. Seeing the phantasmic figures of friends at the moment when they were, whether at the point of death or in good health, many miles distant, must have led the savage irresistibly to the dualistic theory. But hallucinatory figures, both in dreams and waking life, are not necessarily those of the living; from the reappearance of dead friends or enemies primitive man was inevitably led to the belief that there existed an incorporeal part of man which survived the dissolution of the body. The soul was conceived to be a facsimile of the body, sometimes no less material, sometimes more subtle but yet material, sometimes altogether impalpable and intangible. Entry: ANIMISM

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1     1910-1911

To his function as a preacher we owe some of his most characteristic and stimulating works, especially the discourses by which it may be said he won his way to wide and influential recognition--_Endeavours after the Christian Life_, 1st series, 1843; 2nd series, 1847; _Hours of Thought_, 1st series, 1876; 2nd series, 1879; the various hymn-books he issued at Dublin in 1831, at Liverpool in 1840, in London in 1873; and the _Home Prayers_ in 1891. But besides the vocation he had freely selected and assiduously laboured to fulfil, two more external influences helped to shape Martineau's mind and define his problem and his work; the awakening of English thought to the problems which underlie both philosophy and religion, and the new and higher opportunities offered for their discussion in the periodical press. The questions which lived in the earlier and more formative period of his life concerned mainly the idea of the church, the historical interpretation of the documents which described the persons who had created the Christian religion, especially the person and work of its founder; but those most alive in his later and maturer time chiefly related to the philosophy of religion and ethics. In one respect Martineau was singularly happy; he just escaped the active and, on the whole, belittling period of the old Unitarian controversy. When his ministry began its fires were slowly dying down, though the embers still glowed. We feel its presence in his earliest notable work, _The Rationale of Religious Enquiry_, 1836; and may there see the rigour with which it applied audacious logic to narrow premisses, the tenacity with which it clung to a limited literal supernaturalism which it had no philosophy to justify, and so could not believe without historical and verbal authority. This traditional conservatism survived in the statement, which, while it caused vehement discussion when the book appeared, was yet not so much characteristic of the man as of the school in which he had been trained, that "in no intelligible sense can any one who denies the supernatural origin of the religion of Christ be termed a Christian," which term, he explained, was used not as "a name of praise," but simply as "a designation of belief."[8] He censured the German rationalists "for having preferred, by convulsive efforts of interpretation, to compress the memoirs of Christ and His apostles into the dimensions of ordinary life, rather than admit the operation of miracle on the one hand, or proclaim their abandonment of Christianity on the other."[9] The echoes of the dying controversy are thus distinct and not very distant in this book, though it also offers in its larger outlook, in the author's evident uneasiness under the burden of inherited beliefs, and his inability to reconcile them with his new standpoint and accepted principles, a curious forecast of his later development, while in its positive premisses it presents a still more instructive contrast to the conclusions of his later dialectic. Nor did the sound of the ancient controversy ever cease to be audible to him. In 1839 he sprang to the defence of Unitarian doctrine, which had been assailed by certain Liverpool clergymen, of whom Fielding Ould was the most active and Hugh McNeill the most famous. As his share in the controversy, Martineau published five discourses, in which he discussed "the Bible as the great autobiography of human nature from its infancy to its perfection," "the Deity of Christ," "Vicarious Redemption," "Evil," and "Christianity without Priest and without Ritual."[10] He remained to the end a keen and vigilant apologist of the school in which he had been nursed. But the questions proper to the new day came swiftly upon his quick and susceptible mind--enlarged, deepened and developed it. Within his own fold new light was breaking. To W. E. Channing (q.v.), whom Martineau had called "the inspirer of his youth," Theodore Parker had succeeded, introducing more radical ideas as to religion and a more drastic criticism of sacred history. Blanco White, "the rationalist A'Kempis," who had dared to appear as "a religious sceptic in God's presence," had found a biographer and interpreter in Martineau's friend and colleague, John Hamilton Thom. Within the English Church men with whom he had both personal and religious sympathy rose--Whately, of whom he said, "We know no living writer who has proved so little and disproved so much";[11] and Thomas Arnold, "a man who could be a hero without romance";[12] F. D. Maurice, whose character, marked by "religious realism," sought in the past "the witness to eternal truths, the manifestation by time-samples of infinite realities and unchanging relations";[13] and Charles Kingsley, "a great teacher," though one "certain to go astray the moment he becomes didactic."[14] Beside these may be placed men like E. B. Pusey and J. H. Newman, whose mind Martineau said was "critical, not prophetic, since without immediateness of religious vision," and whose faith is "an escape from an alternative scepticism, which receives the _veto_ not of his reason but of his will,"[15] as men for whose teachings and methods he had a potent and stimulating antipathy. The philosophic principles and religious deductions of Dean Mansel he disliked as much as those of Newman, but he respected his arguments more. Apart from the Churches, men like Carlyle and Matthew Arnold--with whom he had much in common--influenced him; while Herbert Spencer in England and Comte in France afforded the antithesis needful to the dialectical development of his own views. He came to know German philosophy and criticism, especially the criticism of Baur and the Tübingen school, which affected profoundly his construction of Christian history. And these were strengthened by French influences, notably those of Renan and the Strassburg theologians. The rise of evolution, and the new scientific way of looking at nature and her creative methods, compelled him to rethink and reformulate his theistic principles and conclusions, especially as to the forms under which the relation of God to the world and His action within it could be conceived. Under the impulses which came from these various sides Martineau's mind lived and moved, and as they successively rose he promptly, by appreciation or criticism, responded to the dialectical issues which they raised. Entry: MARTINEAU

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 17, Slice 7 "Mars" to "Matteawan"     1910-1911

3. _Symphonic Masses._--The enormous dramatic development in the symphonic music of Beethoven made the problem of the Mass with orchestral accompaniment almost insoluble. This makes it all the more remarkable that Beethoven's second and only important Mass (in D, _Op._ 123) is not only the most dramatic ever penned but is, perhaps, the last classical Mass that is thoughtfully based upon the liturgy, and is not a mere musical setting of what happens to be a liturgic text. It was intended for the installation of Beethoven's friend, the archduke Rudolph, as archbishop of Olmütz; and, though not ready until two years after that occasion, it shows the most careful consideration of the meaning of a church service, no doubt of altogether exceptional length and pomp, but by no means impossible for its unique occasion. Immense as was Beethoven's dramatic force, it was equalled by his power of sublime repose; and he was accordingly able once more to put the supreme moment of the music where the service requires it to be, viz. in the _Sanctus_ and _Benedictus_. In the _Agnus Dei_ the circumstances of the time gave him something special to say which has never so imperatively demanded utterance since. Europe had been shattered by the Napoleonic wars. Beethoven read the final prayer of the Mass as a "prayer for inward and outward peace," and, giving it that title, organized it on the basis of a contrast between terrible martial sounds and the triumph of peaceful themes, in a scheme none the less spiritual and sublime because those who first heard it had derived their notions of the horror of war from living in Vienna during its bombardment. Critics who have lived in London during the relief of Mafeking have blamed Beethoven for his realism. Entry: 3

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 17, Slice 7 "Mars" to "Matteawan"     1910-1911

On the whole, however--and this is the main point to be observed with regard to the literary development of the drama--the economic movement of the five- and twenty years between 1865 and 1890 was enormously to the advantage of the dramatic author. A London success meant a long series of full houses at high prices, on which he took a handsome percentage. The provinces, in which a popular playwright would often have three or four plays going the rounds simultaneously, became a steady source of income. And, finally, it was found possible, even before international copyright came into force, to protect stageright in the United States, so that about the beginning of the 'eighties large receipts began to pour in from America. Thus successful dramatists, instead of living from hand to mouth, like their predecessors of the previous generation, found themselves in comfortable and even opulent circumstances. They had leisure for reading, thought and careful composition, and they could afford to gratify their ambition with an occasional artistic experiment. Failure might mean a momentary loss of prestige, but it would not spell ruin. A distinctly progressive spirit, then, began to animate the leading English dramatists--a spirit which found intelligent sympathy in such managers as John Hare, George Alexander, Beerbohm Tree and Charles Wyndham. Nor must it be forgotten that, though the laws of literary property, internal and international, remained far from perfect, it was found possible to print and publish plays without incurring loss of stageright either at home or in America. The playwrights of the present generation have accordingly a motive for giving literary form and polish to their work which was quite inoperative with their predecessors, whose productions were either kept jealously in manuscript or printed only in miserable and totally unreadable stage editions. It is no small stimulus to ambition to know that even if a play prove to be in advance of the standards of taste or thought among the public to which it is originally presented, it will not perish utterly, but will, if it have any inherent vitality, continue to live as literature. Entry: P

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 7 "Drama" to "Dublin"     1910-1911