A Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

It is not until we have passed through the furnace that we are made to know how much dross there is in our composition. — © Charles Caleb Colton
It is not until we have passed through the furnace that we are made to know how much dross there is in our composition.
And we passed through the cavern of rats. And we passed through the path of boiling steam. And we passed through the country of the blind. And we passed through the slough of despond. And we passed through the vale of tears. And we came, finally, to the ice caverns.
This discipline and rough treatment are a furnace to extract the silver from the dross. This testing purifies the gold by boiling the scum away.
You cannot make steel until you have made the iron white-hot in fire. It is not meant for harm. Trouble and disease have a lesson for us. Our painful experiences are not meant to destroy us, but to burn out our dross, to hurry us back Home. No one is more anxious for our release than God.
Every man will have his own criterion in forming his judgment of others. I depend very much on the effect of affliction. I consider how a man comes out of the furnace; gold will lie for a month in the furnace without losing a grain.
I didn’t know how much I could love until you were gone. Until your laughter no longer filled my home, your wicked high jinks no longer made me crazy. Until I stood in that damned club and knew, without you by side, my life was as empty as my bed was without you in it. I didn’t know what love was, until I saw my refusal to admit it drown all the sweet innocence in your eyes. I love you.
We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can't choose where to listen.
People have passed through a very dark tunnel at the end of which there was a light of freedom. Unexpectedly they passed through the prison gates and found themselves in a square. They are now free and they don't know where to go.
In a certain sense I made a living for five or six years out of that one star [? Sagittarii] and it is still a fascinating, not understood, star. It's the first star in which you could clearly demonstrate an enormous difference in chemical composition from the sun. It had almost no hydrogen. It was made largely of helium, and had much too much nitrogen and neon. It's still a mystery in many ways ... But it was the first star ever analysed that had a different composition, and I started that area of spectroscopy in the late thirties.
We are confident. We have ourselves. We know how to sacrifice. We know how to work. We know how to combat the forces that oppose us. But even more than that, we are true believers in the whole idea of justice. Justice is so much on our side, that that is going to see us through.
The habit of always putting off an experience until you can afford it, or until the time is right, or until you know how to do it is one of the greatest burglars of joy. Be deliberate, but once you've made up your mind -jump in.
On one level, I'm interested in how the space dictates the effect visually - how the composition of a given work changes depending on the nature of each wall. But I'm also trying to emphasize less tangible elements: the amount of time it takes to walk the gallery's perimeter; how one's physical distance affects his or her sense of the overall composition; how the size of the space creates a sense of visual rhythm. It's really a matter of seeing how much structure is necessary to impose for those things to become apparent.
Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, “enriched” by all this.
I want labor to be the point, because everything in our lives is miraculously made with no idea of how it's done. As an active and critical consumer, and as someone who has attempted to make the flawless and failed, I wanted a transparency of construction here. If we know how it is made and how it falls apart, we will know how to rebuild it.
But how to know the falsity of death? How can we know there is no death? Until we know that, our fear of death will not go either. Until we know the falsity of death, our lives will remain false. As long as there is fear of death, there cannot be authentic life. As long as we tremble with the fear of death, we cannot summon the capacity to live our lives. One can live only when the shadow of death has disappeared forever. How can a frightened and trembling mind live? And when death seems to be approaching every second, how is it possible to live? How can we live?
[The photograph] is fabricated out of the unfabricated dross of passing life (while paradoxically still trading on the indexical heft of that dross).
In the pain, the agony, and the heroic endeavors of life, we pass through a refiner's fire, and the insignificant and the unimportant in our lives can melt away like dross and make our faith bright, intact, and strong.
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