Top 107 Quotes & Sayings by Theodore Parker - Page 2

Truth stood on one side and Ease on the other; it has often been so.

The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and "only infallible rule" of the nest.

The great basis of the Christian faith is compassion; do not dismiss that from your hearts, neither will your Maker.

It is not from the tall crowded workhouse of prosperity that men first or clearest see the eternal stars of heaven.

Science, also, is most largely indebted to these beauty-loving Greeks, for truth is one form of loveliness.

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.

I look through the grave into heaven.

You may not, cannot, appropriate beauty. It is the wealth of the eye, and a cat may gaze upon a king.

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buffalo never pinches under the arm, never puckers at the shoulders; it is always the same, yet never old fashioned nor out of date.

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.

Be not familiar with the idea of wrong, for sin in fancy mothers many an ugly fact.

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.

Pride is both a virtue and a vice.

It is vain to trust in wrong; as much of evil, so much of loss, is the formula of human history.

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.

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.

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.

Wit has its place in debate; in controversy it is a legitimate weapon, offensive and defensive.

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.

In all the world there is nothing so remarkable as a great man, nothing so rare, nothing which so well repays study.

Science is the natural ally of religion.

Temperance is corporeal piety; it is the preservation of divine order in the body.

For a thousand years no king in Christendom has shown such greatness or given so high a type of manly virtue.

I ask no risen dust to teach me immortality; I am conscious of eternal life.

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.

Nature is God's Old Testament.

The miser, poor fool, not only starves his body, but also his own soul.

Man never falls so low that he can see nothing higher than himself.

Did not Jesus say, resist not evil — with evil? Is not war the worst form of that evil.

Genius is the father of a heavenly line, but the mortal mother, that is industry.

I am conscious of eternal life.

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.

The most useful is the greatest.

Justice is the idea of God, the ideal of man, the rule of conduct writ in the nature of mankind.

Marriages are best made of dissimilar material.

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

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.

All men desire to be immortal.

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 miraculous revelation of the Old Testament and the New, the miracles of famous men, Jews, Gentiles, or Christians, — then Franklin had no religion at all; and it would be an insult to say that he believed in the popular theology of his time, or of ours, for I find not a line from his pen indicating any such belief.

Humanity is the Son of God.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart...

Democracy is direct self-government over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.

What succeeds we keep, and it becomes the habit of mankind.

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.

The lottery of honest labor, drawn by time, is the only one whose prizes are worth taking up and carrying home.

No virtue fades out of mankind. Not over-hopeful by inborn temperament, cautious by long experience, I yet never despair of human virtue.