In general a thing is romantic when, as Aristotle would say, it is wonderful rather than probable; in other words, when it violate...s the normal sequence of cause and effect in favor of adventure. Here is the fundamental contrast between the words classic and romantic which meets us at the outset and in some form or other persists in all uses of the word down to the present day. A thing is romantic when it is strange, unexpected, intense, superlative, extreme, unique, etc. A thing is classical, on the other hand, when it is not unique, but representative of a class. In this sense, medical men may speak correctly of a classic case of typhoid fever, or a classic case of hysteria. One is even justified in speaking of a classic example of romanticism. By an easy extension of meaning a thing is classical when it belongs to a high class or to the best class.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, ...excessive ... and impoverished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have always been astonished that women were allowed to enter churches. What conversation can they possibly have with God? T...he eternal Venus (caprice, hysteria, fantasy) is one of the seductive forms of the Devil.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity... for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life,... never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or backwoodsman, which all men relish.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made ...by the reception of beautiful sentiments.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was a time of madness, the sort of mad-hysteria that always presages war. There seems to be nothing left but war--when any popu...lation in any sort of a nation gets violently angry, civilization falls down and religion forsakes its hold on the consciences of human kind in such times of public madness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I own I never really warmed To the reformer or reformed.... And yet conversion has its place Not halfway down the scale of grace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock- market crash, where they lost several million dollars, a rabble of de...ad money that went sliding off into the sea. Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness.... I felt something like a divine urge to bombard that whole canyon of shadow, where ambulances collected suicides whose hands were full of rings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »