Lawrence Pearsall Jacks Quotes

“In its essence the Gospel is a call to make the experiment of comradeship, the experiment of fellowship, the experiment of trusting the heart of things, throwing self-care to the winds, in the sure and certain faith that you will not be deserted, forsaken nor betrayed, and that your ultimate interests are perfectly secure in the hands of the Great Companion. This insight is the center, the kernel, the growing point of the Christian religion, which, when we have it, all else is secure, and when we have it not, all else is precarious.”

“Our intellectual development in the field of science has outstripped our human development in the field of character.”

“Though science makes no use for poetry, poetry is enriched by science. Poetry takes up the scientific vision and re-expresses its truths, but always in forms which compel us to look beyond them to the total object which is telling its own story and standing in its own rights. In this the poet and the philosopher are one. Using language as the lever, they lift thought above the levels where words perplex and retard its flight, and leave it, at last, standing face to face with the object which reveals itself.”

“No one will know what you mean by saying that 'God is love' unless you act it as well.”

“Cerebral pathology is no bad training for a novelist.”

“Illusion is an integral part of reality.”

“It is one of the signs of decadence in the present age that livelihoods should be procurable by the scientific analysis of religion. Had I the power, I would make it a penal offence to publish the results of such inquiries.”

“There is nothing, which sooner demoralises a man's intelligence than the discovery that he can make money by following the demand of a degenerate public taste.”

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”

“Spirit is matter seen in a stronger light. What else did Malebranche mean when he spoke of seeing all things in God? Existence is a mystery because the light of it is inexhaustible.”

“Faith is nothing else than reason grown courageous — reason raised to its highest power, expanded to its widest vision.”

“The mechanical mind has a passion for control - of everything except itself. Beyond the control it has won over the forces of nature it would now win control over the forces of society of stating the problem and producing the solution, with social machinery to correspond.”

“I had been virtually a Unitarian (as I still am) but without knowing it. The experience of being among Unitarians who did know what they were, and attached much importance to it, was entirely novel to me, but I soon fell into their ways and found it easy to go forward on their road, the more so because the other roads became closed to me.”

“Better that the nation grow poor for a cause we can honor, than grow rich for an end that is unknown.”

“The spirit of fellowship, with its attendant cheerfulness, is in the air. It is comparatively easy to love one's neighbor when we realize that he and we are common servants and common sufferers in the same cause.”

“Are not the richest and most significant experiences of man precisely those which are the least patient of verbal reproduction?”

“Are there not many Arts which, though speechless, express their meanings with perfect adequacy, with satisfaction to the recipient, and serve at the same time as a medium of communication between soul and soul?”

“In all great poetry there is a kind of kenosis of the understanding, a self-emptying of the tongue. Here language points away from itself to something greater than itself.”

“Of all the media of expression employed by man (and let us never forget that they are many) none are so unstable, none so quick to change their meaning, as words. Even sculpture, architecture, painting, in their noblest works, speak differently under different conditions; but these arts are relatively immortal compared with speech.”

“Philosophy has been called the search for the Permanent amid the changing.”

“Philosophy resembles poetry in being an art for enforcing meditation, for driving the mind inwards until it sinks into its Object.”

“The human mind loves the bondage of words and is apt, when freed from one form of their tyranny, to set up another more oppressive than the last.”

“We want philosophers, among other reasons, because the world is full of false philosophy.”