Orville Dewey Quotes

Men cannot labor on always. They must have recreation.

There is nothing to do with men [and women] but to love them; to contemplate their virtues with admiration, their faults with pity and forbearance, and their injuries with forgiveness.

Labour is man's great function, his peculiar distinction, his privilege. Can he not think so? Can he not see, that from being an animal to eat and drink and sleep, to become a worker... He is nothing, he can be nothing, he can achieve nothing, fulfil nothing, without working.

Occupied people are not unhappy people.

Men cannot labor on always. They must have intervals of relaxation. They cannot sleep through these intervals. What are they to do? Why, if they do not work or sleep, they must have recreation. And if they have not recreation from healthful sources, they will be very likely to take it from the poisoned fountains of intemperance. Or, if they have pleasures, which, though innocent, are forbidden by the maxims of public morality, their very pleasures are liable to become poisoned fountains.

The less we parade our misfortunes the more sympathy we command.

How many a knot of mystery and misunderstanding would be untied by one word spoken in simple and confiding truth of heart! How many a solitary place would be made glad if love were there, and how many a dark dwelling would be filled with light!

The love of truth is the stimulus to all noble conversation. This is the root of all the charities. The tree which springs from it may have a thousand branches, but they will all bear a golden and generous fruitage.

Our hearts must not only be broken with sorrow, but be broken from sin, to constitute repentance.

Politeness is practical Christianity.

Argument does not soften, but rather hardens, the obdurate heart.

God giveth true grace to but a chosen few, however many aspire to it.

The dead carry our thoughts to another and nobler existence. They teach us, and especially by all the strange and seemingly untoward circumstances of their departure from this life, that they and we shall live in a future state forever.

A man seems never to know what anything means till he has lost it; and this I suppose is the reason why losses--vanishing away of things--are among the teachings of this world of shadows.

What is there glorious in the world, that is not the product of labor, either of the body or of the mind?

Every relation to mankind, of hate or scorn or neglect, is full of vexation and torment.

Godliness is practical religion.

The taxes of government are heavy enough, but not so heavy as the taxes we lay upon ourselves.

Truth is the root of all the charities.

We may neglect the wrongs which we receive, but be careful to rectify those which we are the cause of to others.