Charles Kingsley Quotes

Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.

This is the feeling that gives a man true courage-the feeling that he has a work to do at all costs; the sense of duty.

These glorious things-words-are man's right alone ... Without words we should know no more of each other's hearts and thoughts than the dog knows of his fellow dog ... for, if you will consider, you always think to yourself in words, though you do not speak them aloud; and without them all our thoughts would be mere blind longings, feelings which we could not understand ourselves.

[The] great fairy Science, who is likely to be queen of all the fairies for many a year to come, can only do you good, and never do you harm ...

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.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message from the dead - from human souls we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away. And yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, arouse us, terrify us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

[ ... ] his little whirl-about of a head was so full of the notion of going out to see the world, that it forgot her in five minutes: however, though his head forgot her, I am glad to say his heart did not.

How long would it take a school-inspector of average activity to tumble head over heels from London toYork?

Never trample on any soul though it may be lying in the veriest mire; for that last spark of self-respect is its only hope, its only chance; the last seed of a new and better life: the voice of God that whispers to it: You are not what you ought to be, and you are not what you can be. You are still God's child, still an immortal soul. You may rise yet. and fight a good fight yet, and be a man once more, after the likeness of God who made you, and Christ who died for you!

Oh! that we two were Maying
Down the stream of the soft spring breeze;
Like children with violets playing,
In the shade of the whispering trees.

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

If I am ever obscure in my expressions, do not fancy that therefore I am deep. If I were really deep, all the world would understand, though they might not appreciate. The perfectly popular style is the perfectly scientific one. To me an obscurity is a reason for suspecting a fallacy.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The most wonderful and the strongest things in the world, you know, are just the things which no one can see.

The heroism of the average mother. Ah! When I think of that broad fact, I gather hope again for poor humanity; and this dark world looks bright ... because, whatever else it is not full of, it is at least full of mothers.

Wherever is love and loyalty, great purposes and lofty souls, even though in a hovel or a mine, there is fairyland.

The men whom I have seen succeed best in life have always been cheerful and hopeful men, who went about their business with a smile on their faces, and took the changes and chances of this mortal life like men, facing rough and smooth alike as it came.

Young blood must have its course, lad, and every dog its day.

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.

Music has been called the speech of the angels; I will go farther and call it the speech of God Himself.

If you do anything above party, the true hearted ones of all parties sympathize with you.

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.

Study nature as the countenance of God.

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

Three fishers went sailing away to the west,/ Away to the west as the sun went down.

What I want is, not to possess religion, but to have a religion that shall possess me.

The Water Babies "Young and Old" When all the world is young, lad, And all the trees are green; And every goose a swan, lad, And every lass a queen; Then hey for boot and horse, lad, And round the world away: Young blood must have its course, lad, And every dog his day.

There is nothing more wonderful than a book. It may be a message to us from the dead, from human souls we never saw who lived perhaps thousands of miles away, and yet these little sheets of paper speak to us, arouse us, teach us, open our hearts and in turn open their hearts to us like brothers. Without books, God is silent, justice dormant, philosophy lame.

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

Men must work, and women must weep.

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.

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

The world is God's world, after all.

Are gods more ruthless than mortals? Have they no mercy for youth? no love for the souls who have loved them?

All the butterflies and cockyolybirds would fly past me.

...children always wake after they have slept exactly as long as is good for them..

Toil is the true knight's pastime.

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

There will be no true freedom without virtue, no true science without religion, no true industry without the fear of God and love to your fellow citizens.

...They were strange and ugly and wrong and horrible, and it all began to come back to him, they were men.

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

Those clouds are angels' robes.

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.

Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy.

How many serious family quarrels, marriages out of spite, and alterations of wills, might have been prevented by a gentle dose of blue pill!-What awful instances of chronic dyspepsia in the characters of Hamlet and Othello! Banish dyspepsia and spirituous liquors from society, and you have no crime, or at least so little that you would not consider it worth mentioning.

There is a great deal of human nature in man.

In the light of fuller day,
Of purer science, holier laws.

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.

It's all in the day's work, as the huntsman said when the lion ate him.

I want you to look and think. I want every one to look and think. Half the misery in the world comes first from not looking, and then from not thinking. And I do not want you to be miserable.

Oh, don't hurt me!" cried Tom. "I only want to look at you; you are so handsome.

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

In proportion as man gets back the spirit of manliness, which is self-sacrifice, affection, loyalty loan idea beyond himself, a God above himself, so far will he rise above circumstances, and wield them at his will.

He was not only, I soon discovered, a water drinker, but a strict vegetarian, to which, perhaps, he owed a great deal of the almost preternatural clearness, volubility, and sensitiveness of mind.

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful. Beauty is God's handwriting - a way-side sacrament; welcome it in every fair face, every fair sky, every fair flower, and thank Him for it, who is the Fountain of all loveliness, and drink it in simply and earnestly with all your eyes; it is a charmed draught, a cup of blessing.

Nothing is so infectious as example.

I have fought my fight, I have lived my life,
I have drunk my share of wine;
From Trier to Coln there was never a knight
Led a merrier life than mine.

Do you think that a man is renewed by God's Spirit, when except for a few religious phrases, and a little more outside respectability, he is just the old man, the same character at heart he ever was?

Nothing like one honest look, one honest thought of Christ upon His cross. That tells us how much He has been through, how much He endured, how much He conquered, how much God loved us, who spared not His only begotten Son, but freely gave Him for us. Dare we doubt such a God? Dare we murmur against such a God?

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

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.

Do noble things, not dream them all day long.

Have charity; have patience; have mercy. Never bring a human being, however silly, ignorant, or weak
above all, any little child
to shame and confusion of face. Never by petulance, by suspicion, by ridicule, even by selfish and silly haste
never, above all, by indulging in the devilish pleasure of a sneer
crush what is finest and rouse up what is coarsest in the heart of any fellow-creature.

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.

Did it ever strike you that goodness is not merely a beautiful thing, but by far the most beautiful thing in the whole world? So that nothing is to be compared for value with goodness; that riches, honor, power, pleasure, learning, the whole world and all in it, are not worth having in comparison with being good; and the utterly best thing for a person is to be good, even though they were never to be rewarded for it.

Stop!" said the Irishwoman. "I have one more word for you both; for you will both see me again before all is over. Those that wish to be clean, clean they will be; and those that wish to be foul, foul they will be. Remember.

Take comfort, and recollect however little you and I may know, God knows; He knows Himself and you and me and all things; and His mercy is over all His works.

Let us ask ourselves seriously and honestly, " What do I believe after all? What manner of man am I after all? What sort of show would I make after all, if the people around me knew my heart and all my secret thoughts?" What sort of show then do I already make in the sight of Almighty God, who sees every man exactly as he is?

Stick to the old truths and the old paths, and learn their di- vineness by sick-beds and in every-day work, and do not darken your mind with intellectual puzzles, which may breed disbelief, but can never breed vital religion or practical usefulness.

If you wish to be miserable, think about yourself, about what you want, what you like, what respect people ought to pay you, what people think of you; and then to you nothing will be pure. You will spoil everything you touch; you will make sin and misery for yourself out of everything God sends you; you will be as wretched as you choose.

If thou art fighting against thy sins, so is God. On thy side is God who made all, and Christ who died for all and the Spirit who alone gives wisdom, purity, and nobleness.

I can conceive few human states more enviable than that of the man to whom, panting in the foul laboratory, or watching for his life under the tropic forest, Isis shall for a moment lift her sacred veil, and show him, once and for ever, the thing he dreamed not of; some law, or even mere hint of a law, explaining one fact; but explaining with it a thousand more, connecting them all with each other and with the mighty whole, till order and meaning shoots through some old Chaos of scattered observations.

Because I believe in a God of absolute and unbounded love, therefore I believe in a loving anger of His which will and must devour and destroy all which is decayed, monstrous, abortive in His universe till all enemies shall be put under His feet, and God shall be all in all.

Love can make us fiends as well as angels.

Ay, marriage is the life-long miracle, The self-begetting wonder, daily fresh.

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.

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things - the teacher of all truth.

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.

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.

Pain is no evil, unless it conquers us.

And what is the joy of Christ? The joy and delight which springs forever in His great heart, from feeling that He is forever doing good; from loving all, and living for all; from knowing that if not all, yet millions on millions are grateful to Him, and will be forever.

So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.

A man may learn from his Bible to be a more thorough gentleman than if he had been brought up in all the drawing-rooms in London.

Our wanton accidents take root, and grow To vaunt themselves God's laws.

Give me something huge to fight, - and I should enjoy that - but why make me sweep the dust?

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 ...

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

Depend upon it, a man never experiences such pleasure or grief after fourteen years as he does before, unless in some cases, in his first lovemaking, when the sensation is new to him

And what was the song which she sang? Ah, my little man, I am too old to sing that song, and you too young to understand it.

Whatever may be the mysteries of life and death, there is one mystery which the cross of Christ reveals to us, and that is the infinite and absolute goodness of God. Let all the rest remain a mystery so long as the mystery of the cross of Christ gives us faith for all the rest.

Grandeur ... consists in form, and not in size: and to the eye of the philosopher, the curve drawn on a paper two inches long, is just as magnificent, just as symbolic of divine mysteries and melodies, as when embodied in the span of some cathedral roof.

Mathematical knowledge is not-as all Cambridge men are surely aware-the result of any special gift. It is merely the development of those conceptions of form and number which every human being possesses; and any person of average intellect can make himself a fair mathematician if he will only pay continuous attention; in plain English, think enough about the subject.

Have thy tools ready. God will find thee work.

Life is too short for mean anxieties.