Laurence Sterne, Philanthropy Recommended (circa 1768)

Look into the world - how often do you behold a sordid wretch, whose straight heart is open to no man's affliction, taking shelter behind an appearance of piety, and putting on the garb of religion, which none but the merciful and compassionate have a title to wear. Take notice with what sanctity he goes to the end of his days, in the same selfish track in which he at first set out - turning neither to the right hand nor to the left - but plods on - pores all his life long upon the ground, as if afraid to look up, lest peradventure he should see aught which might turn him one moment out of that straight line where interest is carrying him....

Lord Dunsany, The Food of Death (1917)

Death was sick. But they brought him bread that the modern bakers make, whitened with alum, and the tinned meats of Chicago, with a pinch of our modern substitute for salt. They carried him into the dining-room of a great hotel (in that close atmosphere Death breathed more freely), and there they gave him their cheap Indian tea. They brought him a bottle of wine that they called champagne. Death drank it up. They bought a newspaper and looked up the patent medicines; they gave him the foods that it recommended for invalids, and a little medicine as prescribed in the paper. They gave him some milk and borax, such as children drink in England.

Death arose ravening, strong, and strode again through the cities.

W.H. Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago (1918)

Nature could charm, she could enchant me, and her wordless messages to my soul were to me sweeter than honey and the honeycomb, but she could not take the sting and victory from death, and I had perforce to go elsewhere for consolation. Yet even so, in my worst days, my darkest years, when occupied with the laborious business of working out my own salvation with fear and trembling, with that spectre of death always following me, even so I could not rid my mind of its old passion and delight. The rising and setting sun, the sight of a lucid blue sky after cloud and rain, the long unheard familiar call-note of some newly-returned migrant, the first sight of some flower in spring, would bring back the old emotion and would be like a sudden ray of sunlight in a dark place -- a momentary intense joy, to be succeeded by ineffable pain. Then there were times when these two opposite feelings mingled and would be together in my mind for hours at a time, and this occurred oftenest during the autumnal migration, when the great wave of bird-life set northwards, and all through March and April the birds were visible in flock succeeding flock from dawn to dark, until the summer visitants were all gone, to be succeeded in May by the birds from the far south, flying from the Antarctic winter.

This annual spectacle had always been a moving one, but the feeling it now produced -- this mingled feeling -- was most powerful on still moonlight nights, when I would sit or lie on my bed gazing out on the prospect, earth and sky, in its changed mysterious aspect. And, lying there, I would listen by the hour to the three-syllable call-note of the upland or solitary plover, as the birds went past, each bird alone far up in the dim sky, winging his way to the north. It was a strange vigil I kept, stirred by strange thoughts and feelings, in that moonlit earth that was strange too, albeit familiar, for never before had the sense of the supernatural in Nature been stronger.

John Cowper Powys, The War and Culture (1914)

There is industrial immorality, and there is military immorality, just as there is industrial heroism and military heroism. Human nature remains human nature - that strange agglomeration of devotion and depravity, of animal lusts and saintly ascetism - and it seems as though it were destined to retain this paradoxical character to the end of its history. But meanwhile the conditions under which the inevitable "struggle for existence" rages are bound materially to change. Perfect human felicity is doubtless a pathetic illusion, but there is no reason why certain obvious abuses, certain obvious results of insane mismanagement, should not be removed. This is not idealism. It is common sense. War under modern conditions is such an abuse, such a piece of pure insanity; and to put an end to war were not to outrage the laws of nature by a stroke of monstrous ideality, it were simply to give a new direction to these laws by the use of common intelligence.

Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (1907)

Let me speak plainly. After my long experience, after my patience and forbearance, I have surely the right to protest against the untruth (would that I could apply to it any other word!) that evangelical religion, or any religion in a violent form, is a wholesome or valuable or desirable adjunct to human life. It divides heart from heart. It sets up a vain, chimerical ideal, in the barren pursuit of which all the tender, indulgent affections, all the genial play of life, all the exquisite pleasures and soft resignations of the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative. It encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation; it throws altogether out of gear the healthy movement of the conscience; it invents virtues which are sterile and cruel; it invents sins which are no sins at all, but which darken the heaven of innocent joy with futile clouds of remorse. There is something horrible, if we will bring ourselves to face it, in the fanaticism that can do nothing with this pathetic and fugitive existence of ours but treat it as if it were the uncomfortable ante-chamber to a palace which no one has explored and of the plan of which we know absolutely nothing.

Nell Kimball, Her Life As An American Madam (1918)

In a house and outside a house in everyone's life I soon saw the dullness of being was kept from full despair and boredom by talking about small things - as if they were great big answers. You go on building little joys and small irritations and fights into big ones. Soldiers told me war was like that for all the fine colored pictures and flag waving, battle songs. Mostly it was waiting, going stale, being bored. When killing and dying came, they came fast, so that a soldier could only catch a foggy corner of what was going on. One told me of the battle of Cold Harbor - it was like bits of faces in a broken mirror. One young fellow, a horse soldier from the Sioux wars, told me he began to love killing.

Jacob Riis, The Battle With the Slum (1902)

The wise men had their day, and they decided to let bad enough alone; that it was unsafe to interfere with "causes that operate sociologically," as one survivor of these unfittest put it to me. It was a piece of scientific humbug that cost the age which listened to it dear. "Causes that operate sociologically" are the opportunity of the political and every other kind of scamp who trades upon the depravity and helplessness of the slum, and the refuge of the pessimist who is useless in the fight against them.

Max Born, Experiment and Theory in Physics (1943)

But I am no expert in these cosmological questions, and I do not intend to stress some weak points of the theory. That would be unjust, for the audacity of the idea of deducing the structure of the world from a few principles, and the skill in overcoming formidable difficulties, can but be admired. I do not wish to discourage anybody who feels in himself the vocation to embark on so adventurous a journey.

But I believe that there is no philosophical highroad in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed. We do not find signposts at crossroads, but our own scouts erect them, to help the rest.

Alan Garner, Achilles In Altjira (1983)

The function of the storyteller is to relate the truth in a manner that is simple; for it is rarely possible to declare the truth as it is, because the universe presents itself as a Mystery. We have to find parables, we have to tell stories to unriddle the world. It is yet another paradox. Language, no matter how finely worked, will not speak the truth. What we feel most deeply we cannot say in words. At such levels only images connect; and hence story becomes symbol.

John Ruskin, Sesames and Lilies (1864)

A great nation...does not spend its entire national wits for a couple of months in weighing evidence of a single ruffian`s having done a single murder; and for a couple of years see its own children murder each other by their thousands or tens of thousands a day, considering only what the effect is likely to be on the price of cotton, and caring nowise to determine which side of battle is in the wrong. Neither does a great nation send its poor little boys to jail for stealing six walnuts; and allow its bankrupts to steal their hundreds or thousands with a bow, and its bankers, rich with poor men's savings, to close their doors "under circumstances over which they have no control," with a "by your leave"; and large landed estates to be bought by men who have made their money by going with armed steamers up and down the China Seas, selling opium at the cannon's mouth, and altering, for the benefit of the foreign nation, the common highwayman's demand of "your money or your life," into that of "your money and your life." Neither does a great nation allow the lives of its innocent poor to be parched out of them by fog fever, and rotted out of them by dunghill plague, for the sake of sixpence a life extra per week to its landlords; and then debate, with driveling tears, and diabolical sympathies, whether it ought not piously to save, and nursingly cherish, the lives of its murderers.

Johann Baptist Metz, Productive Noncontemporaneity (1984)

The future, especially that of a new life dedicated to solidarity, is not nourished merely on the stuff of contemporaneity or on a noncontemporaneity rendered contemporaneous. The future of the village is not simply the urban center; the future of the cathedral is not simply the bank or the politically cultified mausoleum (as architecture may wish to insinuate); the future of childhood dreams is not simply the adult world of reason; and the future of religion is not simply a pallid utopia. Precisely for the sake of a future life of solidarity, noncontemporaneity demands more respect - and not only from traditionalists and conservatives, who, after all, only confirm themselves in it and who derive from it no spark of promise.

Edward Lear, Letters of Edward Lear (1907)

A broader creed, - a better form of worship - the cessation of nonsense and curses - and the recognition of a new state of matters brought about by centuries, science, destiny or what not - will assuredly be demanded and come to pass whether Bishops and priests welcome the changes or resist them. Not those who believe that God the Creator is greater than a Book, stereotyped by ancient legends, gross ignorance. and hideous bigotry - not those are the Infidels - but these same screamy ganders of the church, who put darkness forward and insist that it is light.

Lester Ward, Mind as a Social Factor (1884)

When a well-clothed philosopher on a bitter winter’s night sits in a warm room well lighted for his purpose and writes on paper with pen and ink in the arbitrary characters of a highly developed language the statement that civilisation is the result of natural laws, and that man’s duty is to let nature alone so that untrammeled it may work out a higher civilisation, he simply ignores every circumstance of his existence and deliberately closes his eyes to every fact within the range of his faculties. If man had acted upon his theory there would have been no civilisation, and our philosopher would have remained a troglodyte.

But how shall we distinguish this human, or anthropic, method from the method of nature? Simply by reversing all the definitions. Art is the antithesis of nature. If we call one the natural method we must call the other the artificial method. If nature’s process is rightly named natural selection, man’s process is artificial selection. The survival of the fittest is simply the survival of the strong, which implies, and might as well be called, the destruction of the weak. And if nature progresses through the destruction of the weak, man progresses through the protection of the weak.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lost Notebook (1837)

Man's finest workmanship, the closer you observe it, the more imperfections it shows:- as, in a piece of polished steel, a microscope will discover a rough surface.- Whereas, what may look coarse and rough in Nature's workmanship, will show an infinitely minute perfection, the closer you look into it.