We are afraid of love because Love is a small death. Love requires that we should surrender, and we don't want to surrender at all. We would like the OTHER to surrender, we would like the other to be a slave. But the same is the desire from the other side: man wants the woman to be a slave; and of course the woman also wants the same, the SAME desire is there. Their methods of enslaving each other may be different, but the desire is the same.
I cannot understand how any man or woman can believe in the Lord's coming and not be a missionary, or at least committed to the work of missions with every power of his being.
The saddest object in civilization, and to my mind the greatest confession of its failure, is the man who can work, who wants work, and who is not allowed to work.
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. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.
Thus with most careful devotion Thus with precise attention To detail, interfering preparation Of that which is already prepared Men lighten the knot of confusion Into perfect misunderstanding, Reflecting a pocket-torch of observation.
Every man alone is sincere.
At the entrance of a second person,
hypocrisy begins.
We parry and fend the approach
of our fellow-man by compliments,
by gossip, by amusements, by affairs.
We cover up our thought from him
under a hundred folds.