Joseph Fort Newton Quotes

Belief is truth held in the mind; faith is a fire in the heart.

London is like a dream come true. As I ramble through it I am haunted by the curious feeling of something half-forgotten, but still dimly remembered, like a reminiscence of some previous state of existence. It is at once familiar and strange.

So many of us know what we are against, but not what we are for-what we disbelieve, not what we believe. A negative life easily becomes neutral and futile.

Every man has a train of thought on which he rides when he is alone.

To be happy is easy enough if we give ourselves, forgive others, and live with thanksgiving, No self centered person, no ungrateful soul can ever be happy, much less make anyone else happy. Life is giving, not getting.

The discovery of the Square was a great event to the primitive mystics of the Nile. Very early it became an emblem of truth, justice, and righteousness, and it remains to this day through unaccountable ages have passed.

God works for man through man and seldom, if at all, in any other way. He asks for our voices to speak His truth, for our hands to do His work here below, sweet voices and clean hands to make liberty and love prevail over injustice and hate.

Instead of criticizing Masonry, let us than God for one alter where no man is asked to surrender his liberty of thought and become an indistinguishable atom on a mass of sectarian agglomeration.

The real question, after all, is not the quantity of life, but its quality, its depth, its purity, its fortitude, its fineness of spirit and gesture of soul.

Masonry is too great an institution to have been made in a day, much less by a few men, but was a slow evolution through long time, unfolding its beauty as it grew. Indeed, it was like one of its own cathedrals which one generation of builders wrought and vanished, and another followed, until, amidst vicissitudes of time and change, of decline and revival, the order itself became a temple of Freedom and Fraternity.

Not what we have, but what we use, not what we see, but what we choose, these are the things that mar or bless the sum of human happiness.

Masonry superadds to our other obligations the strongest ties of connection between it and the cultivation of virtue, and furnishes the most powerful incentives to goodness.

Each lodge is an oasis if equality and good will in a desert of strife, working to wield mankind into a great league of sympathy and services, which, by the terms of our definition, it seeks to exhibit now on a small scale.

People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges.

London, with its monotonous and melancholy houses, seems like an inharmonious patchwork, as if pieced together without design. Yet it is lovable in its sprawling confusion.

We cannot tell what may happen to us in the strange medley of life. But we can decide what happens in us - how we can take it, what we do with it - and that is what really counts in the end.

There came a day when the Masons, laying aside their stones, became workmen of another kind, not less builders than before, but using truths for tools and dramas for designs, uplifting such a temple as Watts dreamed of decorating with his visions of the august allegory of the evolution of man.