Theodore Parker Quotes - Page 3

What sad faces one always sees in the asylums for orphans! It is more fatal to neglect the heart than the head.

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

[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.

Greatness is its own torment.

The Bible goes equally to the cottage of the peasant, and the palace of the king. - It is woven into literature, and colors the talk of the street. The bark of the merchant cannot sail without it; and no ship of war goes to the conflict but it is there. It enters men's closets; directs their conduct, and mingles in all the grief and cheerfulness of life.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The most useful is the greatest.

I am conscious of eternal life.

I look through the grave into heaven.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

As society advances the standard of poverty rises.