Quotes from blackie john stuart iii

Man is naturally a sympathetic and a social animal. He has, no doubt, strong, self-preserving, self-asserting, and self-advancing instincts, which, if left without counteraction, would naturally lead to isolation or mutual hostility, and ultimate extermination; but these instincts of isolated individualism are met by yet stronger instincts of sympathy, love, and fellowship, in the ascendency of which the true humanity of man as distinguished from tigerhood and spiderhood consists.

It is of the very nature of a high ideal to be unattainable, to admit only of approximation; and one of the highest compliments that can be paid to Christianity is that, when purely presented, it is apt to seem a great deal too good for the creatures to whom it is addressed.

Though the masses may stare at the man who does violence to all his natural instincts, under the name of piety, and rends his flesh to prove the strength of his will, they will never be induced to follow his example.

No consideration is so powerful with schoolboys as that of being laughed at for any singularity in dress or appearance; the slavery of fashion among grown-up persons is founded partly on the same dread; and the fear of standing in a minority restrains many a man in public life from giving voice to a salutary truth, and planting a gag on the barking mouth of popular error.

Man is an inventive animal, and he does not invent from a compulsion of nature, as bees make cells or as swallows build nests. These are all prescribed operations which the animal must perform; but the inventive faculty in man is free, in such a manner that the course of its action cannot be foreseen or calculated. It revels in variety, and, above all things, shuns that uniformity which is the servile province of brute activity.

Love is born among groves and singing-birds.

Things absolutely necessary to healthy existence were necessarily known from the earliest ages, unless indeed we imagine that the primeval man was created in a state of physical and moral disease, that he might grope and blunder his way into health, as some theorists assert that he groped and blundered his way from a tiger into a moral being, and from a monkey into a man.