Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Wit has its place in debate; in controversy it is a legitimate weapon, offensive and defensive.
It is vain to trust in wrong; as much of evil, so much of loss, is the formula of human history.
Justice is the idea of God, the ideal of man, the rule of conduct writ in the nature of mankind.
Applying good sense to religion and religion to life. This is the field in which I design to labor
You may not, cannot, appropriate beauty. It is the wealth of the eye, and a cat may gaze upon a king.
Self-denial is indispensable to a strong character, and the highest kind comes from a religious stock.
Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization, whence light and heat radiated out into the dark.
Science, also, is most largely indebted to these beauty-loving Greeks, for truth is one form of loveliness.
Let others laugh when you sacrifice desire to duty, if they will. You have time and eternity to rejoice in.
For a thousand years no king in Christendom has shown such greatness or given so high a type of manly virtue.
What sad faces one always sees in the asylums for orphans! It is more fatal to neglect the heart than the head.
The lottery of honest labor, drawn by time, is the only one whose prizes are worth taking up and carrying home.
It is not from the tall crowded workhouse of prosperity that men first or clearest see the eternal stars of heaven.
The great basis of the Christian faith is compassion; do not dismiss that from your hearts, neither will your Maker.
In all the world there is nothing so remarkable as a great man, nothing so rare, nothing which so well repays study.
The duty of labor is written on a man's body: in the stout muscle of the arm,, and the delicate machinery of the hand.
The diamond which shines in the Saviour's crown shall burn in unquenched beauty at last on the forehead of every human soul.
I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one. . . . But from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.
The use of great men is to serve the little men, to take care of the human race, and act as practical interpreters of justice and truth.
No virtue fades out of mankind. Not over-hopeful by inborn temperament, cautious by long experience, I yet never despair of human virtue.
Gratitude is a nice touch of beauty added last of all to the countenance. Giving a classic beauty, an angelic loveliness, to the character.
All the spaces between my mind and the mind of God are full of truths waiting to be crystallized into laws for the government of the masses.
Such a large sweet fruit is a complete marriage, that it needs a very long summer to ripen in and then a long winter to mellow and season it.
The coat of the buffalo never pinches under the arm, never puckers at the shoulders; it is always the same, yet never old fashioned nor out of date.
It is very sad for a man to make himself servant to a single thing; his manhood all taken out of him by the hydraulic pressure of excessive business.
Yet, if he would, man cannot live all to this world. If not religious, he will be superstitious. IF he worship not the true God, he will have his idols.
There is no intercessor, angel, mediator, between man and God; for man can speak and God hear, each for himself. He requires no advocates to plead for men.
Did the mass of men know the actual selfishness and injustice of their rulers, not a government would stand a year. - The world would foment with revolution.
He prays best who, not asking God to do man's work, prays penitence, prays resolutions, and then prays deeds--thus supplicating with heart and head and hands.
The miser, starving his brother's body, starves also his own soul, and at death shall creep out of his great estate of injustice, poor and naked and miserable
Love of truth will bless the lover all his days; yet when he brings her home, his fair-faced bride, she comes empty-handed to his door, herself her only dower.
The miser, starving his brother's body, starves also his own soul, and at death shall creep out of his great estate of injustice, poor and naked and miserable.
Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect. Be true to your own mind and conscience, your heart and your soul. So only can you be true to God.
Truth never yet fell dead in the streets; it has such affinity with the soul of man, the seed however broadcast will catch somewhere and produce its hundredfold.
There never was a great truth but it was reverenced; never a great institution, nor a great man, that did not, sooner or later, receive the reverence of mankind.
Want and wealth equally harden the human heart, as frost and fire are both alien to the human flesh. Famine and gluttony alike drive away nature from the heart of man.
The whole sum and substance of human history may be reduced to this maxim: that when man departs from the divine means of reaching the divine end, he suffers harm and loss.
What a joy is there in a good book, writ by some great master of thought, who breaks into beauty as in summer the meadow into grass and dandelions and violets, with geraniums and manifold sweetness.
[America is] a rebellious nation. Our whole history is treason; our blood was attained before we were born; our creeds were infidelity to the mother church; our constitution treason to our fatherland.
All men need something to poetize and idealize their life a little-something which they value for more than its use, and which is a symbol of their emancipation from the mere materialism and drudgery of daily life.
I believe in the admission of women to the full rights of citizenship and share in government, on the express grounds that few women keep house so badly or with such wastefulness as chancellors of the exchequer keep the state.
To obtain a knowledge of duty, a man is not sent away, outside of himself, to ancient documents; for the only rule of faith a practice, the Word, is very nigh him, even in his heart, and by this word he is to try all documents.
Every rose is an autograph from the hand of the Almighty God on this world about us. He has inscribed His thoughts in these marvelous hieroglyphics which sense and science have been these many thousand years seeking to understand.
The union of men in large masses is indispensable to the development and rapid growth of the higher faculties of men. Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization whence light and heat radiated out into the dark cold world.
A democracy,- that is a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government of the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake I will call it the idea of Freedom.
The Roman Christian mythology (and theology) discourages the vice of licentiousness, and so this is better than the heathen, but it encourages bigotry, hypocrisy, cant, and many another vice which the older Mother of Abominations kept clear from.
Man is the highest product of his own history. The discoverer finds nothing so grand or tall as himself, nothing so valuable to him. The greatest star is at the small end, of the telescope,--the star that is looking, not looked after nor looked at.
Mankind never loses any good thing, physical, intellectual, or moral, till it finds a better, and then the loss is a gain. No steps backward is the rule of human history. What is gained by one man is invested in all men, and is a permanent investment for all time.
I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight, I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.
The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading; every man that tries it finds it so. But a great book that comes from a great thinker, — it is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth, with beauty too.