Augustus Hare Quotes

Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail, and mankind the vessel.

Love, it has been said, flows downward. The love of parents for their children has always been far more powerful than that of children for their parents; and who among the sons of men ever loved God with a thousandth part of the love which God has manifested to us?

The intellect of the wise is like glass; it admits the light of heaven and reflects it.

Truth, when witty, is the wittiest of all things.

Few persons have courage enough to appear as good as they really are.

There is no being eloquent for atheism. In that exhausted receiver the mind cannot use its wings, - the clearest proof that it is out of its element.

The virtue of Paganism was strength: the virtue of Christianity is obedience.

A man prone to suspect evil is mostly looking in his neighbor for what he sees in himself.

Crimes sometimes shock us too much; vices almost always too little.

Every Irishman, the saying goes, has a potato in his head.

The greatest truths are the simplest, and so are the greatest men.

Man without religion is the creature of circumstances: Religion is above all circumstances, and will lift him up above them.

The question is not whether a doctrine is beautiful but whether it is true. When we wish to go to a place, we do not ask whether the road leads through a pretty country, but whether it is the right road.

Never put much confidence in such as put no confidence in others.

Some people carry their hearts in their heads; very many carry their heads in their hearts. The difficulty is to keep them apart, yet both actively working together.

Nothing is farther than earth from heaven; nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept of the stretch.

A statesman, we are told, should follow public opinion. Doubtless, as a coachman follows his horses; having firm hold on the reins and guiding them.

To Adam Paradise was home. To the good among his descendants home is paradise.

What a person praises is perhaps a surer standard, even than what he condemns, of his own character, information and abilities.

Examples would indeed be excellent things were not people so modest that none will set, and so vain that none will follow them.

Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to know the sense of it.

It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life.

The power of faith will often shine forth the most when the character is naturally weak.

Man is a mixed being, made up of a spiritual soul and of a fleshly body; the angels are pure spirits, herein nearer to God, only that they are created and finite in all respects, free from decay, free from the power of death, whereas God is infinite and uncreated.