In the marriage ceremony, that moment when falling in love is replaced by the arduous drama of staying in love, the words "for ric...her, for poorer, in sickness and in health,' til death us do part" set love in the temporal context in which it achieves its meaning. As time begins to elapse, one begins to love the other because they have shared the same experience, the same moments of duration. Selves may not intertwine but lives do, and shared memory becomes as much of a bond as the bond of the flesh. One might say shared memory is not love itself but a consequence of being in love; but in what people commonly say about long-lasting love, it is the attitudes toward time implied in such words such as constancy and fidelity that recur.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The business eternally passing thro' my mind and occupying it exclusively, wipes out at once the recollection of things which have... been presented to it but once, and on which it has had no occasion to recur.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Forgetfulness is necessary to remembrance. Ideas are retained by renovation of that impression which time is always wearing away, ...and which new images are striving to obliterate. If useless thoughts could be expelled from the mind, all the valuable parts of our knowledge would more frequently recur, and every recurrence would reinstate them in their former place.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We do not weary of eating and sleeping every day, for hunger and sleepiness recur. Without that we should weary of them. So, witho...ut the hunger for spiritual things, we weary of them. Hunger after righteousness--the eighth beatitude.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection... than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
History cannot, like physical science, deduce causal laws of general application. All attempts have failed to discover laws of "ca...use and effect" which are certain to repeat themselves in the institutions and affairs of men. The law of gravitation may be scientifically proved because it is universal and simple. But the historical law that starvation brings on revolt is not proved; indeed the opposite statement, that starvation leads to abject submission, is equally true in the light of past events. You cannot so completely isolate any historical event from its circumstances as to be able to deduce from it a law of general application. Only politicians adorning their speeches with historical arguments have this power; and even they never agree. An historical event cannot be isolated from its circumstances, any more than the onion from its skins, because an event is itself nothing but a set of circumstances, none of which will ever recur.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »