Top 16 Quotes & Sayings by Jenkin Lloyd Jones

The cathedral, at its noblest, is the best outward symbol of the spiritual nature of man, as it is also the most suggestive measure and prophecy of the corporate life of man.

My parents were lured to America by the democracy here promised. In our family, freedom was a word to conjure by. Hoping for larger privileges for the growing family of children, they brought them to the New World, the world of many intellectual as well as material advantages.

Whence, then, did the cathedral derive its power? Clearly here: It took back the family into the confidences of religion. It taught man and woman how the human and the divine love could go hand in hand.

The story of the decadence of the cathedral as a moral power, a spiritual energizer in civilization, is the sad but inevitable story of dogmatism. It is the story of the struggle of free thought with bigotry, religion making common cause with the wrong side.

Not until the human heart is stolid to poetry, the human eye blind to beauty, not until the intellect ceases its quest for truth and conscience finds its quietus either in universal defeat or in triumphant success, will organized religion cease to be.

Introduced to this world in Llandyssul, Cardiganshire, Wales, November 14, 1843, I celebrated my first anniversary by landing at Castle Garden, in New York City.

I am the third Jenkin Jones to preach that liberal interpretation of Christianity generally known as Unitarianism.

My father was a prosperous hatter-farmer - making hats for the local markets during the winter months, tilling his little ten-acre farm during the summer time.

Are there not thousands who have loved virtue who did not accept Jesus Christ in any supernatural or miraculous fashion, who, if they knew of him at all, knew of him only as the Nazarene peasant - the man Jesus. Such was Abraham Lincoln, the tender prophet of the gospel of good will upon earth.

You have typewriters, presses. And a huge audience. How about raising hell?

Duty is a better guide than stars or statutes.

Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he’s been robbed. The fact is that most putts don’t drop, most beef is tough, most children grow up to just be people, most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration, most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. Life is like an old-time rail journey—delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders, and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride.

Seek the underlying harmonies of love and the overarching rainbow of hope, rather than the surface distinctions of creeds and of sects. Work for peace in religion.

The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride

The human soul finds its saddest imprisonment when it is helpless in the presence of cruelty, when it cannot right a wrong. It finds its highest freedom when it can secure justice to others.

The grandchildren of the kids who used to weep because the Little Match Girl froze to death now feel cheated if she isn't slugged, raped and thrown into a Bessemer converter.