The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll Volume XII Part 28

FATE.--Never hurried, never delayed, pa.s.sionless, pitiless, patient, keeping the tryst--neither early nor late--there, on the very stroke and center of the instant fixed.

QUIET, and introspective calm come with the afternoon. Toward evening the mind grows satisfied and still. The flare and flicker of youth are gone, and the soul is like the flame of a lamp where the air is at rest.

Age discards the superfluous, the immaterial, the straw and chaff, and h.o.a.rds the golden grain. The highway is known, and the paths no longer mislead. Clouds are not mistaken for mountains.

THE OLD MAN has been long at the fair. He is acquainted with the jugglers at the booths. His curiosity has been satisfied. He no longer cares for the exceptional, the monstrous, the marvelous and deformed. He looks through and beyond the gilding, the glitter and gloss, not only of things, but of conduct, of manners, theories, religions and philosophies. He sees clearer. The light no longer shines in his eyes.

The time will come when even selfishness will be charitable for its own sake, because at that time the man will have grown and developed to that degree that selfishness demands generosity and kindness and justice. The self becomes so n.o.ble that selfishness is a virtue. The lowest form of selfishness is when one is willing to be happy, or wishes to be happy, at the expense or the misery of another. The highest form of selfishness is when a man becomes so n.o.ble that he finds his happiness in making others so. This is the n.o.bility of selfishness.

CUBA fell upon her knees--stretched her thin hands toward the great Republic. We saw her tear-filled eyes--her withered b.r.e.a.s.t.s--her dead babes--her dying--her buried and unburied dead. We heard her voice, and pity, roused to action by her grief, became as stern as justice, and the great Republic cried to Spain: "Sheathe the dagger of a.s.sa.s.sination; take your b.l.o.o.d.y hand from the throat of the helpless; and take your flag from the heaven of the Western World."

Perhaps I have reached the years of discretion. But it may be that discretion is the enemy of happiness. If the buds had discretion there might be no fruit. So it may be that the follies committed in the spring give autumn the harvest.--August 11,1892.

d.i.c.kens wrote for homes--Thackeray for clubs. Byron did not care for the fireside--for the prattle of babes--for the smiles and tears of humble life. He was touched by grandeur rather than goodness,--loved storm and crag and the wild sea. But Burns lived in the valley, touched by the joys and griefs of lowly lives.

Imagine amethysts, rubies, diamonds, emeralds and opals mingled as liquids--then imagine these marvelous glories of light and color changed to a tone, and you have the wondrous, the incomparable voice of Scalchi.

THE ORGAN.--The beginnings--the timidities--the half thoughts--blushes--suggestions--a phrase of grace and feeling--a sustained note--the wing on the wind--confidence--the flight--rising with many harmonies that unite in the voluptuous swell--in the pa.s.sionate tremor--rising still higher--flooding the great dome with the soul of enraptured sound.

NEW MEXICO is a most wonderful country. It is a ragged miser with billions of buried treasure. It looks as if Nature had guarded her silver and gold with enough desolation to deter all but the brave.

WHY SHOULD THE INDIAN SUMMER of a life be lost--the long, serene, and tender days when earth and sky are friends? The falling leaves disclose the ripened fruit--and so the flight of youth with dreams and fancies should show the wealth of bending bough.

Give milk to babes, and wine to youth. But for old age, when ghosts of more than two-score years are wandering on the traveled road, the fragrant tea, that loosens gossip's tongue, is best.--December 25,1892.

[From a letter thanking a friend for a Christmas present of a chest of tea.]

ON MEMORIAL DAY our hearts blossom in grat.i.tude as we lovingly remember the brave men upon whose brows Death, with fleshless hands, placed the laurel wreath of fame.

THE SOUL IS AN ARCHITECt--it builds a habitation for itself--and as the soul is, is the habitation. Some live in dens and caves, and some in lowly homes made rich with love, and overrun with vine and flower.

SCIENCE at last holds with honest hand the scales wherein are weighed the facts and fictions of the world. She neither kneels nor prays, she stands erect and thinks. Her tongue is not a traitor to her brain. Her thought and speech agree.

THE NEGRO who can pa.s.s me in the race of life will receive my admiration, and he can count on my friendship. No man ever lived who proved his superiority by trampling on the weak.

RELIGION is like a palm tree--it grows at the top. The dead leaves are all orthodox, while the new ones and the buds are all heretics.

MEMORY is the miser of the mind; forgetfulness the spendthrift.

HOPE is the only bee that makes honey without flowers.

THE FIRES OF THE NEXT WORLD sustain the same relation to churches that those in this world sustain to insurance companies.

Now and then there arises a man who on peril's edge draws from the scabbard of despair the sword of victory.

The falling leaf that tells of autumn's death is, in a subtler sense, a prophecy of spring.

Vice lives either before Love is born, or after Love is dead.

Intellectual freedom is only the right to be honest.

I believe that finally man will go through the phase of religion before birth.