All-merciful Father, indeed! Why, the Prince of Darkness was angel in comparison (and a gentleman into the bargain). There is no knowledge in search of which people in general are more eager, than that of what others have been doing in the World.

There are people who read books to convince themselves there is a God. Like busts in marble, so does our individual fate exist in the limestone of time. Throughout all eternity, the parts of the past are but parts of the future reversed.

Destiny, it may be,–the most skillful of stage managers,–seldom choose to arrange its scenes, and carry forward its drama, without securing the presence of at least one calm observer. Incidents little in human speculation are great in the eye of fortune.

Chance and change love to deal with men’s settled plans, not with their idle vagaries. All things fulfill their destiny. Reassume your courage, not the courage to die, but to live. I am on another level, can you feel my flow? The God of this World is in the machine—not out of it.

Energy is perhaps of all qualities the most valuable. This was a century in which the fine arts and the higher mechanical arts were not separated by any distinct boundary, nor were those who practiced them; and it was an age in which artists sought and loved one another. I wonder if you are ever feel that zing because it should greater the temptation to supply its place by a ritual? Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.

Should this last statement stagger a painter or writer of our day, let me remind him that even Christians loved one another at first starting. Civility should take leave: where nothing is due to love, something is due to good manners. I am naturally civil when I am civilly used. It always remains true that when all the ways of our unintelligible World are the trivial and the terrible walk hand in hand together. The irony of circumstances holds no mortal catastrophe in respect.

For wise and good reasons, God made the knowledge of Himself scarce any otherwise attainable by us, than that of the existence of other beings absent to sense. The will is placed in the soul, and who can enter there but he that created the soul? What are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!

When you would understand of that great Being truly and fully, you must be able to realize the duration of eternity, obliterate the little periods of time and chronology, which require a starting and a resting-place in human minds—soar out the reach of the sickly atmospheres which surround these little planets, and stand erect in the broad and fathomless light of God’s own atmosphere.

People who like any society better than none are, in general, those who know least how to enjoy it. When a man will give it a fair play, common sense will get the better in all cases. There are times when a man must act as though life were equally sweet in any company. The Angels were created from light and the Jinn from smokeless fire.

Jinn live longer than humans and can take on any form they would like: human, true, car, building. They are able to attracts a person’s great attention. Jinns possess people for several purposes. In some cases, the Jinn will alter a person’s reality because it or its family has been accidentally hurt. Nevertheless, it could be because the Jinn has fallen in love with the person.

When a man has told all he has to say, the sooner he is silent the better. A person dying in a state of great sin may be changed into a Jinn, in the period of a barzakh, separation barrier. Some say they live in the mystical emerald mountains in the celestial sphere surrounding the Earth. Some say they are pagan gods. Jinn have free will.

There was said to be a Jinn in the Garden of Eden with Adam, but he refused to submit to Adam and was expelled from Paradise and called Satan. They are usually invisible to humans, but humans do appear clearly to Jinn.  Jinn have the power to travel large distances at extreme speeds and are thought to live in their own communities. The Jinn occasionally assume human form to mislead and destroy their human victims.

There is an intoxication that makes merry in the midst of affliction; and there is an intoxication that banishes affliction by producing oblivion. However, again, there is an intoxication which is conscious of itself through it makes the feet unsteady, and the voice think, and the brain foolish; and which brings neither mirth nor oblivion. A mistaken sense of duty has been the cause of quite one fourth of the unhappiness of mankind, and few have been so bigoted as not to acknowledge this when it is too late.

How shall so young a scholar, in the school of affliction, be able to bear such heavy and such various evils? A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude. The elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.

When it does not lead to spending money, liveliness is a pleasant thing. How will injuries never honorably complained of be believed to grieve us? There is nothing more likely to succeed with an audience than a good history of witchcraft, or something so very marvelous, as to do violence to common sense, before we give it our faith.

Life is full of the saddest and the strongest contrasts. Much more does affliction demand our love when it proceeds from compassion for another’s woes. Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the World. However, his heart assured him that love is faith, and faith is his nature.