Assorted Writings

He never put his foot inside a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place where he was born. He never did one of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but Himself. He had nothing to do with the world except the naked power of His divine manhood.

While still a young man, thy tide of public opinion turned against Him. His friends ran away. One of them denied Him.He was turned over to his enemies. He went through the mockery of a trail. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. His executioners gambled for the only piece of property He had on earth while He was dying--and that His coat. When He was dead He was taken down and laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend.

Nineteen wide centuries have come and gone and today He is the centerpiece of the human race and the leader of the column of progress.

All the armies that ever marched, and all the navies that ever were built, and all the parliments that ever sat, and all the kings that ever reigned, put together have not affected the life of man upon this earth as powerfully as has that one solitary life.

You have but one day to pass upon earth: order it so that you may pass it in peace.
Peace is the fruit of love; for love lies at the bottom of pure hearts as the drop of dew in the calyx of a flower.
Oh, if you knew what it was to love!
You say that you love, and many of your brothers lack bread to sustain life; clothing to cover their naked limbs; a roof to shelter them; a handful of straw to sleep upon; while you have abundance of everything.

You say that you love, while there are sick ones in great numbers, languishing on their wretched couches without help; unhappy ones weeping, and no one to weep with them; little children going about all stiff with cold, from door to door, asking the rich for a crumb of bread from their tables, and not getting it.
You say that you love your brothers, and what would you do if you hated them?

If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on.When a man appears the world bears down on him and breaks his back. There are too many rotten pillars left standing, too much festering humanity for man to bloom.

The superstructure is a lie and the foundation is a huge quaking fear. If at intervals of centuries there does appear a man with a desperate, hungry look in his eye, a man who would turn the world upside down in order to create a new race, the love that he brings to the world is turned to bile and he becomes a scourge.

If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and the words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality.

If a man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experiece, what is truly his truth, I think the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.

Happiness, I have discovered, is nearly always a rebound from hard work. It is one of the follies of men to imagine that they can enjoy mere thought, or emotion, or sentiment. As well try to eat beauty! For happiness must be tricked! She loves to see men at work.

She loves sweat, weariness, self-sacrifive. She will be found not in palaces but lurking in cornfields and factories and hovering over littered desks; she crowns the unconscious head of the busy child. If you look up suddenly from hard work you will see her, but if you look too long she fades sorrowfully away.

There is something fine in hard physical labor. One actually stops thinking.I often work long without any thought whatever, so far as I know, save that connected with the monotonous repetition of the labor itself--down with the spade, out with it, up with it--and repeat. And yet sometimes, mostly in the fore noon when I am not at all tired, I will suddenly have a sense as of the world opening around me--a sense of its beauty and its meaning--giving me a peculiar deep happiness, that is near complete content.