Charles Kingsley Quotes

For science is ... like virtue, its own exceeding great reward.

You must not say that this cannot be, or that that is contrary to nature. You do not know what Nature is, or what she can do; and nobody knows; not even Sir Roderick Murchison, or Professor Huxley, or Mr. Darwin, or Professor Faraday, or Mr. Grove, or any other of the great men whom good boys are taught to respect. They are very wise men; and you must listen respectfully to all they say: but even if they should say, which I am sure they never would, 'That cannot exist. That is contrary to nature,' you must wait a little, and see; for perhaps even they may be wrong.

[At the end of the story, its main character, Tom] is now a great man of science, and can plan railroads, and steam-engines, and electric telegraphs, and rifled guns, and so forth; and knows everything about everything, except why a hen's egg don't turn into a crocodile, and two or three other little things that no one will know till the coming of the Cocqcigrues.

There's no use doing a kindness if you do it a day too late.

Every winter, When the great sun has turned his face away, The earth goes down into a vale of grief, And fasts, and weeps, and shrouds herself in sables, Leaving her wedding-garlands to decay- Then leaps in spring to his returning kisses.

Music. – There is something very wonderful in music. Words are wonderful enough: but music is even more wonderful. It speaks not to our thoughts as words do: it speaks straight to our hearts and spirits, to the very core and root of our souls. Music soothes us, stirs us up; it puts noble feelings into us; it melts us to tears, we know not how: – it is a language by itself, just as perfect, in its way, as speech, as words; just as divine, just as blessed.

Do noble things, not dream them all day long: And so make Life, Death, and the vast Forever one grand, sweet song.

In the four hundred and thirteenth year of the Christian era, some three hundred miles above Alexandria, the young monk Philammon was sitting on the edge of a low range of inland cliffs, crested with drifting sand.

It is only the great hearted who can be true friends. The mean and cowardly, Can never know what true friendship means.

All but God is changing day by day.

I hope that my children, at least, if not I myself, will see the day when ignorance of the primary laws and facts of science will be looked upon as a defect only second to ignorance of the primary laws of religion and morality.

Gradually the sunken land begins to rise again, and falls perhaps again, and rises again after that, more and more gently each time, till as it were the panting earth, worn out with the fierce passions of her fiery youth, has sobbed herself to sleep once more, and this new world of man is made.

See the land, her Easter keeping, Rises as her Maker rose. Seeds, so long in darkness sleeping, Burst at last from winter snows. Earth with heaven above rejoices.

O Mary, go and call the cattle home, And call the cattle home, And call the cattle home, Across the sands o' Dee!

There are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with cream.

And no one has the right to say that no water-babies exist, till they have seen no water-babies existing; which is quite a different thing, mind, from not seeing water-babies; and a thing which nobody ever did, or perhaps will ever do. But surely ... they would have put it into spirits, or into the Illustrated News, or perhaps cut it into two halves, poor dear little thing, and sent one to Professor Owen, and one to Professor Huxley, to see what they would each say about it.

For to be discontented with the divine discontent, and to be ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ and first upgrowth of all virtue.

There are two freedoms - the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.

Friendship is like a glass ornament, once it is broken it can rarely be put back together exactly the same way.

If you want to be miserable, think about yourself, about what you want, what you like, what respect people ought to pay you and what people think of you.

The Invitation, To Tom Highes What we can we will be, Honest Englishmen. Do the work that's nearest, Though it's dull at whiles, Helping, when we meet them, Lame dogs over stiles.

Duty--the command of heaven, the eldest voice of God.

The traveler fancies he has seen the country. So he has, the outside of it at least; but the angler only sees the inside. The angler only is brought close, face to face with the flower and bird and insect life of the rich riverbanks, the only part of the landscape where the hand of man has never interfered.

After all, there is such a thing as looking like a gentleman. There are men whose class no dirt or rags can hide, any more than they could Ulysses. I have seen such men in plenty among workmen, too; but, on the whole, the gentleman--by whom I do not mean just now the rich--have the superiority in that point. But not, please God, forever. Give us the same air, water, exercise, education, good society, and you will see whether this "haggardness," this "coarseness" (etc., for the list is too long to specify), be an accident, or a property, of the man of the people.

Did not learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons could exist.

I go at what I have to do as if there were nothing else in the world for me to do.

Do what thou dost as if the earth were heaven, and thy last day the day of judgment.

A blessed thing it is to have a friend; one human soul whom we can trust utterly; who knows the best and worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all our faults; who will speak the honest truth to us, while the world flatters us to our face, and laughs at us behind our back; who will give us counsel and reproof in a day of prosperity and self-conceit; but who, again, will comfort and encourage us in days of difficulty and sorrow, when the world leaves us alone to fight our own battle as we can.

If you wish to be like a little child, study what a little child could understand — nature; and do what a little child could do — love.

I am not aware that payment, or even favors, however gracious, bind any man's soul and conscience in questions of highest morality and highest importance.

I do not want merely to possess a faith, I want a faith that possesses me.

Feelings are like chemicals, the more you analyze them the worse they smell.

The loveliest fairy in the world; and her name is Mrs Do as you would bed one by.

You must not talk about 'ain't and can't' when you speak of this great wonderful world round you, of which the wisest man knows only the very smallest corner, and is, as the great Sir Isaac Newton said, only a child picking up pebbles on the shore of a boundless ocean.

It has been said that true religion will make a man a more thorough gentleman than all the courts in Europe. And it is true that you may see simple laboring men as thorough gentlemen as any duke, simply because they have learned to fear God; and, fearing him, to restrain themselves, which is the very root and essence of all good breeding.

If "ifs" and "ands" were pots and pans, there'd be no work for tinkers' hands

I do not see why we should not be as just to an ant as to a human being.

Do you feel that you have lost your way in life? Then God Himself will show you your way. Are you utterly helpless, worn out, body and soul? Then God's eternal love is ready and willing to help you up, and revive you. Are you wearied with doubts and terrors? Then God's eternal light is ready to show you your way; God's eternal peace ready to give you peace. Do you feel yourself full of sins and faults? Then take heart; for God's unchangeable will is, to take away those sins, and purge you from those faults.

Cheerfulness is full of significance: it suggests good health, a clear conscience, and a soul at peace with all human nature.

A garden, sir, wherein all rainbows and flowers were heaped together.

We have used the Bible as if it was a mere special constable's handbook — an opium-dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they were being overloaded — a mere book to keep the poor in order.

My friends, let us try to follow the Saviour's steps; let us remember all day long what it is to be men; that it is to have every one whom we meet for our brother in the sight of God; that it is this, never to meet anyone, however bad he may be, for whom we cannot say: "Christ died for that man, and Christ cares for him still. He is precious in God's eyes, and he shall be precious in mine also".

So fleet the works of men, back to their earth again;Ancient and holy things fade like a dream.

Nature's deepest laws, her only true laws, are her invisible ones.

Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.

Look at the bow in the cloud, in the very rain itself. That is a sign that the sun, though you cannot see it, is shining still -- that up above beyond the cloud is still sunlight and warmth and cloudless blue sky.

[A]ll the ingenious men, and all the scientific men, and all the fanciful men, in the world,... could never invent, if all their wits were boiled into one, anything so curious and so ridiculous as a lobster.

Now, to tell my story--if not as it ought to be told, at least as I can tell it,--I must go back sixteen years, to the days when Whitbury boasted of forty coaches per diem, instead of one railway, and set forth how in its southern suburb, there stood two pleasant house side by side, with their gardens sloping down to the Whit, and parted from each other only by the high brick fruit-wall, through which there used to be a door of communication; for the two occupiers were fast friends.