Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling
T.S. Eliot, East Coker (No. 2 of ‘Four Quartets’)
Benedict enacted a fantasy that has inflamed the hearts of men and women before and since—-the idea of making a life apart from the crowd, in a style at odds with the norm. Not everyone so inspired retreats to an actual cave or enters monastic life, an yet anyone even today, might catch the spirit and look for solitude in a home by the sea or in a hike deep into the woods or in a style of living contrary in most respects to current standards.
Thomas Moore
To spiritualize one’s age — that is something worth doing. If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs. We are, and must be, one and all, burdened with faults in this world; but the time will come when, I trust, we shall put them off in putting off our corruptible bodies; when debasement and sin will fall from us with this cumbrous frame of flesh, and only the spark of the spirit will remain,—the impalpable principle of life and thought, pure as when it left the Creator to inspire the creature
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre