Word: manned
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1870-1879
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Advocate. The word itself is popular almost everywhere in this country, and we find it here as the index to a view of life that is also widely held, though rarely so frankly stated. This view can be given in a few sentences. The business of a man's life is happiness, which, if not equivalent to, is at least entirely dependent on, success. The attainment of some final object, whatever it is, is thus the great requisite in his life; and, success being insured, the higher the object he seeks, the greater his happiness, it being always kept...
...will the happiness described in this article go towards making a man, in any sense, happy? Suppose a man to succeed in limiting his desires to but one thing, - wealth, let us say, or knowledge; have we not enough examples to teach us that this one thing would never be reached, and that, even supposing it reached, the poor wretch would still have enough soul to render him miserable, "a little grain of conscience" to "make him sour"? And if we seek for happiness, for success, from culture, about which we are so fond of talking, shall we be more...
...leuchtet mir ein, I see a glimpse of it!' cries he elsewhere: 'there is in man a HIGHER than Love of Happiness: he can do without Happiness and instead thereof find Blessedness! Was it not to preach forth this same HIGHER that sages and martyrs, the Poet and the Priest, in all times, have spoken and suffered; bearing testimony, through life and through death, of the Godlike that is in Man, and how in the Godlike only has he Strength and Freedom...
...affects so greatly to despise? "Affects," I say, for he does not believe the barren creed he professes; he holds to a higher standard for life than he admits; he betrays himself when he speaks of "Thackeray's Warrington, - to our mind, in spite of his failure, the noblest man in English fiction...
This brings us to the question of success. If what has been already said be true, if the noblest part of man's nature makes him long for what can never be attained in this life, if the desire for this and struggle after this are more to be coveted than all temporal prosperity, must not that success, in the narrow sense that this author uses the word, be just the thing not to be desired, and a feeling of failure, notwithstanding the work of a lifetime, be the best proof of a faith worth having? To quote once more...