Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Fling away your soul once for all, your own small self; if you will find it again. Count not even on immortality.
The moral system of the universe is like a document written in alternate ciphers, which change from line to line.
Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; but a belief is always sensitive.
Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; [but] a creed is always sensitive.
Those who seek for something more than happiness in this world must not complain if happiness is not their portion.
No person is ever good for much, that hasn't been swept off their feet by enthusiasm between ages twenty and thirty
No person is ever good for much, that hasn't been swept off their feet by enthusiasm between ages twenty and thirty.
Men think to mend their condition by a change of circumstances. They might as well hope to escape from their shadows.
Woe to the unlucky man who as a child is taught, even as a portion of his creed, what his grown reason must forswear.
We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.
Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.
There is always a part of our being into which those who are dearer to us far than our own lives are yet unable to enter.
The secret of a person's nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.
A single seed of fact will produce in a season or two a harvest of calumnies; but sensible men will pay no attention to them.
It is ill changing the creed to meet each rising temptation. The soul is truer than it seems, and refuses to be trifled with.
What is called virtue in the common sense of the word has nothing to do with this or that man's prosperity, or even happiness.
Just laws are no restraint upon the freedom of the good, for the good man desires nothing which a just law will interfere with.
Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.
The trials of life will not wait for us. They come at their own time, not caring much to inquire how ready we may be to meet them.
I would sooner perish for ever than stoop down before a Being who may have power to crush me, but whom my heart forbids me to reverence.
We are complex, and therefore, in our natural state, inconsistent, beings, and the opinion of this hour need not be the opinion of the next.
Morality rests upon a sense of obligation; and obligation has no meaning except as implying a Divine command, without which it would cease to be.
The war of good and evil is mightiest in mightiest souls, and even in the darkest time the heart will maintain its right against the hardest creed.
The moral of human life is never simple, and the moral of a story which aims only at being true to human life cannot be expected to be any more so.
True greatness is the most ready to recognize and most willing to obey those simple outward laws which have been sanctioned by the experience of mankind.
I scarcely know a professional man I can like, and certainly not one who has been what the world calls successful, that I should the least wish to resemble.
Man is a real man, and can live and act manfully in this world, not in the strength of opinions, not according to what he thinks, but according to what he is .
The essence of true nobility is neglect of self. Let the thought of self pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone, like the bloom from a soiled flower.
Nature is not a partisan, but out of her ample treasue house she produces children in infinite variety, of which she is equally the mother, and disowns none of them.
I have long been convinced that the Christian Eucharist is but a continuation of the Eleusinian mysteries. St Paul, in using the word teleiois, almost confirms this.
Charity is from person to person; and it loses half, far more than half, its moral value when the giver is not brought into personal relation with those to whom he gives.
The Providence that watches over the affairs of men works out of their mistakes, at times, a healthier issue than could have been accomplished by their wisest forethought.
We cannot live on probabilities. The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it is nothing.
But the world was also so constructed, owing to the nature of the Maker of it, that superior strength was found in the long run to lie with those who had the right on their side.
Life is change, to cease to change is to cease to live; yet if you may shed a tear beside the death-bed of an old friend, let not your heart be silent on the dissolving of a faith.
Scepticism, like wisdom, springs out in full panoply only from the brain of a god, and it is little profit to see an idea in its growth, unless we track its seed to the power which sowed it.
History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.
Look not to have your sepulchre built in after ages hy the same foolish hands which still ever destroy the living prophet. Small honour for you if they do build it; and may be they never will build it.
Instead of man to love, we have a man-god to worship . From being the example of devotion, he is its object; the religion of Christ ended with his life , and left us instead but the Christian religion.
The solitary side of our nature demands leisure for reflection upon subjects on which the dash and whirl of daily business, so long as its clouds rise thick about us, forbid the intellect to fasten itself.
In every department of life--in its business and in its pleasures, in its beliefs and in its theories, in its material developments and in its spiritual connections--we thank God that we are not like our fathers.
I am convinced with Plato , with St. Paul, with St. Augustine, with Calvin , and with Leibnitz, that this universe, and every smallest portion of it, exactly fulfils the purpose for which Almighty God designed it.
I could never fear a God who kept a hell prison-house. No, not though he flung me there because I refused. There is a power stronger than such a one; and it is possible to walk unscathed even in the burning furnace.
For me this world was neither so high nor so low as the Church would have it; chequered over with its wild light shadows, I could love it and all the children of it, more dearly, perhaps, because it was not all light.
You cannot reason people into loving those whom they are not drawn to love; they cannot reason themselves into it; and there are some contrarieties of temper which are too strong even for the obligations of relationship.
The soul of man is not a thing which comes and goes, is builded and decays like the elemental frame in which it is set to dwell, but a very living force, a very energy of God's organic will, which rules and moulds this universe.
A dreamer he was, and ever would be. Yet dreaming need not injure us, if it do but take its turn with waking; and even dreams themselves may be turned to beauty, by favoured men to whom nature has given the powers of casting them into form.
If you think you can temper yourself into manliness by sitting here over your books, it is the very silliest fancy that ever tempted a young man to his ruin. You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.
There are at bottom but two possible religions--that which rises in the moral nature of man, and which takes shape in moral commandments, and that which grows out of the observation of the material energies which operate in the external universe.
Women's eyes are rapid in detecting a heart which is ill at ease with itself, and, knowing the value of sympathy, and finding their own greatest happiness not in receiving it, but in giving it, with them to be unhappy is at once to be interesting.