He that outlives a wife whom he has long loved, sees himself disjoined from the only mind that has the same hopes, and fears, and ...interest; from the only companion with whom he has shared much good and evil; and with whom he could set his mind at liberty, to retrace the past or anticipate the future. The continuity of being is lacerated; the settled course of sentiment and action is stopped; and life stands suspended and motionless.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are women in middle life, whose days are crowded with practical duties, physical strain, and moral responsibility ... they f...ail to see that some use of the mind, in solid reading or in study, would refresh them by its contrast with carking cares, and would prepare interest and pleasure for their later years. Such women often sink into depression, as their cares fall away from them, and many even become insane. They are mentally starved to death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reason, progress, unselfishness, a wide historical perspective, expansiveness, generosity, enlightened self-interest. I had heard ...it all my life, and it filled me with despair.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital in a railway-system in the belief that they would make... money by it in this life, in the thirteenth they trusted their money to the Queen of Heaven because of their belief in her power to repay it with interest in the life to come.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I feel my belief in sacrifice and struggle getting stronger. I despise the kind of existence that clings to the miserly trifles of... comfort and self-interest. I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Combining paid employment with marriage and motherhood creates safeguards for emotional well-being. Nothing is certain in life, bu...t generally the chances of happiness are greater if one has multiple areas of interest and involvement. To juggle is to diminish the risk of depression, anxiety, and unhappiness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studious contemplation but an action, even if it is only an inner action. Their acquisi...tion obligates each man in some way to change his life, even if it is only his inner life. They demand to be stood for. They dictate where a man must concentrate his vision. They determine his moral and intellectual priorities. They provide him with allies and make him enemies. In short, ideas impose an interest in their ultimate fate which goes far beyond the realm of the merely reasonable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In chess we find several quite crisp distinctions that can also be discerned rather more problematically in the larger game of lif...e. There are, for instance, the "forced moves" in chess. Moves are occasionally forced by the rules of chess: in these instances one finds oneself so boxed in that one and only one legal move is available.... More interesting ... are the forced moves on those occasions when there is more than one legal move, but only one non-idiotic, non-"suicidal" move, which is said for that reason to be forced. It is forced not by the rules of chess, and not by the laws of physics, but by the dictates of reason. It is obviously the only rational thing to do, given one's interest in winning (or just not losing) the game.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For that's what a woman, a mother wants--to teach her children to take an interest in life. She knows it's safer for them to be in...terested in other people's happiness than to believe in their own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »