Theodore Parker Quotes

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

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.

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

Pride is both a virtue and a vice.

No man is so great as mankind.

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight, I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

It is very sad for a man to make himself servant to a single thing; his manhood all taken out of him by the hydraulic pressure of excessive business.

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

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one. . . . But from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.

Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization, whence light and heat radiated out into the dark.

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never pinches under the arm, never puckers at the shoulders; it is always the same, yet never old fashioned nor out of date.

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.

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

First there is the democratic idea: that all men are endowed by their creator with certain natural rights; that these rights are alienable only by the possessor thereof; that they are equal in men; that government is to organize these natural, unalienable and equal rights into institutions designed for the good of the governed, and therefore government is to be of all the people, by all the people, and for all the people. Here government is development, not exploitation.

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 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.

The joy of heaven will begin as soon as we attain the character of heaven, and do its duties.

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

The great man is to be the servant of mankind, not they of him.

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.

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

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

Science is the natural ally of religion.

The diamond which shines in the Saviour's crown shall burn in unquenched beauty at last on the forehead of every human soul.

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.

Marriages are best made of dissimilar material.

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

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.

Every rose is an autograph from the hand of the Almighty God on this world about us. He has inscribed His thoughts in these marvelous hieroglyphics which sense and science have been these many thousand years seeking to understand.

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

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect.

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

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

The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading; every man that tries it finds it so. But a great book that comes from a great thinker, — it is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth, with beauty too.

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.

All men desire to be immortal.

Democracy means not "I am as good as you are" but "You are as good as I am.".

Want and wealth equally harden the human heart, as frost and fire are both alien to the human flesh. Famine and gluttony alike drive away nature from the heart of man.

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.

That which is called liberality is frequently nothing more than the vanity of giving.

The earnestness of life is the only passport to satisfaction of life.

Love is the piety of the affections.

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

Let us do our duty in our shop or our kitchen, in the market, the street, the office, the school, the home, just as faithfully as if we stood in the front rank of some great battle, and knew that victory for mankind depended on our bravery, strength, and skill. When we do that, the humblest of us will be serving in that great army which achieves the welfare of the world.