Theodore Parker
The use of great men is to serve the little men, to take care of the human race, and act as practical interpreters of justice and truth.Collection: Greatness
Justice is the idea of God, the ideal of man, the rule of conduct writ in the nature of mankind.Collection: Men
Man never falls so low that he can see nothing higher than himself.Collection: Fall
All the spaces between my mind and the mind of God are full of truths waiting to be crystallized into laws for the government of the masses.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Men
For a thousand years no king in Christendom has shown such greatness or given so high a type of manly virtue.Collection: Kings
The miser, poor fool, not only starves his body, but also his own soul.Collection: Soul
Yet, if he would, man cannot live all to this world. If not religious, he will be superstitious. IF he worship not the true God, he will have his idols.Collection: Religious
Science is the natural ally of religion.Collection: Allies
No virtue fades out of mankind. Not over-hopeful by inborn temperament, cautious by long experience, I yet never despair of human virtue.Collection: Long
Who escapes a duty, avoids a gain.Collection: Gains
The earnestness of life is the only passport to satisfaction of life.Collection: Satisfaction
Man is the jewel of God, who has created this material world to keep his treasure in.Collection: Men
Great success is a great temptation.Collection: Temptation
Such a large sweet fruit is a complete marriage, that it needs a very long summer to ripen in and then a long winter to mellow and season it.Collection: Summer
There is no college for the conscience.Collection: College
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.Collection: Flower
That which is called liberality is frequently nothing more than the vanity of giving.Collection: Vanity
Love is the piety of the affections.Collection: Love
It takes a Newton to forge a Newton. What man could have fabricated a Jesus? None but a Jesus.Collection: Christian
Applying good sense to religion and religion to life. This is the field in which I design to laborCollection: Design
To obtain a knowledge of duty, a man is not sent away, outside of himself, to ancient documents; for the only rule of faith a practice, the Word, is very nigh him, even in his heart, and by this word he is to try all documents.Collection: Heart
Marriages are best made of dissimilar material.Collection: Marriage
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.Collection: Nature
Manly natural religion - it is not joining the Church; it is not to believe in a creed, Hebrew, Protestant, Catholic, Trinitarian, Unitarian, Nothingarian. It is not to keep Sunday idle; to attend meetings; to be wet with water; to read the Bible; to offer prayers in words; to take bread and wine in the meeting house; love a scape-goat Jesus, or any other theological clap-trap.Collection: Jesus
The Roman Christian mythology (and theology) discourages the vice of licentiousness, and so this is better than the heathen, but it encourages bigotry, hypocrisy, cant, and many another vice which the older Mother of Abominations kept clear from.Collection: Christian
The diamond which shines in the Saviour's crown shall burn in unquenched beauty at last on the forehead of every human soul.Collection: Shining
Humanity is the sin of GodCollection: Humanity
The joy of heaven will begin as soon as we attain the character of heaven, and do its duties.Collection: Character
He prays best who, not asking God to do man's work, prays penitence, prays resolutions, and then prays deeds--thus supplicating with heart and head and hands.Collection: Prayer
It seems strange that a butterfly's wing should be woven up so thin and gauzy in the monstrous loom of nature, and be so delicately tipped with fire from such a gross hand, and rainbowed all over in such a storm of thunderous elements. The marvel is that such great forces do such nice work.Collection: Nature
Silence is a figure of speech, unanswerable, short, cold, but terribly severe.Collection: Silence
What sad faces one always sees in the asylums for orphans! It is more fatal to neglect the heart than the head.Collection: Heart
The great basis of the Christian faith is compassion; do not dismiss that from your hearts, neither will your Maker.Collection: Christian
[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.Collection: Mother
Greatness is its own torment.Collection: Greatness
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.Collection: Kings
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.Collection: Angel
The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and "only infallible rule" of the nest.Collection: Age
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.Collection: Truth
The lottery of honest labor, drawn by time, is the only one whose prizes are worth taking up and carrying home.Collection: Home
What succeeds we keep, and it becomes the habit of mankind.Collection: Success
It is vain to trust in wrong; as much of evil, so much of loss, is the formula of human history.Collection: Loss
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.Collection: Dark
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.Collection: Summer
The most useful is the greatest.Collection: Greatness
I am conscious of eternal life.Collection: Immortality
I look through the grave into heaven.Collection: Heaven
Be not familiar with the idea of wrong, for sin in fancy mothers many an ugly fact.Collection: Mother