up what is truly our destiny is contained in those of our thoughts
which, hurried along by the mass of ideas still obscure, indistinct,
incomplete, have had strength sufficient--or been forced, it may be--to
turn into facts, into gestures, into feelings and habits. We do not
imply by this that the other thoughts should be neglected. Those that
surround our actual life may perhaps be compared with an army besieging
a city. The city once taken, the bulk of the troops would probably not
be permitted to pass through the gates. Admission would be doubtless
withheld from the irregular part of the army--barbarians, mercenaries,
all those, in a word, whose natural tendencies would lead them to
drunkenness, pillage, or bloodshed. And it might also very well happen
that fully two-thirds of the troops would have taken no part in the
final decisive battle. But there often is value in forces that appear
to be useless; and the city would evidently not have yielded to panic
and thrown open her gates, had the well-disciplined force at the foot
of the walls not been flanked by the hordes in the valley. So is it in
moral life, too. Those thoughts are not wholly vain that have been
unable to touch our actual life; they have helped on, supported, the
others; yet is it these others alone that have fully accomplished their
mission And therefore does it behove us to have in our service, drawn
up in front of the crowded ranks of our sad and bewildered thoughts, a
group of ideas more human and confident, ready at all times to
penetrate vigorously into life.

61. Even when our endeavour to emerge from reality is due to the purest
desire for immaterial good, one gesture must still be worth more than a
thousand intentions; nor is this that intentions are valueless, but
that the least gesture of goodness, or courage, or justice, makes
demands upon us far greater than a thousand lofty intentions.
Chiromantists pretend that the whole of our life is engraved on our
palm; our life, according to them, being a certain number of actions
which imprint ineffaceable marks on our flesh, before or after
fulfilment; whereas not a trace will be left by either thoughts or
intentions. If I have for many long days cherished projects of murder
or treachery, heroism or sacrifice, my hand will tell nothing of these;
but if I have killed some one--involuntarily perhaps, imagining he was
about to attack me; or if I have rescued a child from the flames that
enwrapped i