Experience, the only true knowledge, teaches me that, for everyone, good luck is in store. My only wickedness is that I love you; my only goodness, the same. The purser is a conjurer; he can make a dead man chew tobacco. How far a man has any right to be more lucky and hence more venerable than his kind of higgling and haggling of the market, and ultimately by brute force; but however this may be, it stands to reason that no man should be allowed to be unlucky to more than a moderate extent. Come and I will heal you. The inner power of Life within me is God, and God has all power. I will heal and help all who come to me. I know that the realization of life and love within me heals all who come into Its presence. I silently bless all who enter my atmosphere. It is not I, but the Father who dwelleth in me, He doeth the works. I heal all who come near me. Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. Love is a passion which kindles honor into noble acts. A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage—but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.

Nonetheless, measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.  A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents Conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique World—Art. Meanin’ goes but a little way I am most things, for you may mean to stick things together and your glue may be bad, and then where are you? The length of the Sun’s journeying can no more tell us how far life has advanced than the acreage of a field can tell us what growths may be active within it. There is no place but the Universe; no limit but the limitless; no bottom but the bottomless. Cheerfulness depends as much as the state of things within, as without. With what complacency will a young parson deduce false conclusions from misunderstood texts, and then threaten us with all the penalties of Hades if we neglect to comply with the injunctions, he has given us! What man has ever felt that all his thinking powers were absorbed, even by the most poignant mental misery that could occupy them? In the moments of imminent dangers, the mind can still travel of its own accord over the past in spite of the present—in moments of bitter affliction, it can still recur to everyday trifles in spite of ourselves.

 Pain of the mind is relieved by an abstraction of solid thought. He had bruised his eloquence, for through you may start a sermon from stones to hit the stars, he must be practiced orator who shall descend out of the abstract to take up a heavy lump of the concrete without unseating himself. It is painful to be frustrated in what we propose as our pleasure. I have known a good man wish to have bad news true, merely because he had related them: and we may conceive a saint vexed at not finding a man dead, when he had digested a funeral sermon in his mind, and was ready to bury him. Is there not a sublimity in the obscure? I want something that I cannot understand. Give me the divine that will speak through his nose, whack the pulpit, and make the whole house ring; who will shut his eyes, and open his mouth, and stamp with his foot. It is of no moment whether I understand his words or not; or rather, I would not wish to understand him, for if I did, I would it for granted that it was not so deep as it out to be. 

The Winchester Mystery House

 Discover the tales of the ghosts and specters that linger in The Winchester Mystery House. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/