Theodore Parker Quotes

[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.

Applying good sense to religion and religion to life. This is the field in which I design to labor

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.

If belief in the miraculous revelation of the Old Testament and the New is required to make a man religious, then Franklin had no religion at all. 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.

Who escapes a duty, avoids a gain.

Outward judgment often fails, inward judgment never.

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

I believe in the admission of women to the full rights of citizenship and share in government, on the express grounds that few women keep house so badly or with such wastefulness as chancellors of the exchequer keep the state.

It takes years to marry completely two hearts, even of the most loving and well-assorted. A happy wedlock is a long falling in love. Men and women marry fractionally, now a small and then a larger fraction ... Such a long and sweet fruit needs a long summer to ripen in and a long winter to season in. But real and happy marriage is one of those things so handsome that if the sun were, as the Greek poets fabled it, a god, he might stop the world and hold it still now and then to feast his eyes on such a spectacle.

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.

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

No man is so great as mankind.

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.

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

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

Greatness is its own torment.

Everything gives way to money, and money gives way to nothing, neither to man nor to God.

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

And war-the worst form of evil!

No virtue fades out of mankind. Not over-hopeful by inborn temperament, cautious by long experience, I yet never despair of human virtue.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart.

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.

Wit has its place in debate; in controversy it is a legitimate weapon, offensive and defensive.

I am conscious of eternal life.

The most useful is the greatest.

It is not from the tall crowded workhouse of prosperity that men first or clearest see the eternal stars of heaven.

The miser, starving his brother's body, starves also his own soul, and at death shall creep out of his great estate of injustice, poor and naked and miserable.

Self-denial is indispensable to a strong character, and the highest kind comes from a religious stock.

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.

Intellect is stronger than cannon.

As society advances the standard of poverty rises.

All men desire to be immortal.

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

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

Remorse is the pain of sin.

There is no college for the conscience.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

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.

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.

Let others laugh when you sacrifice desire to duty, if they will. You have time and eternity to rejoice in.

Nature is God's Old Testament.

The lottery of honest labor, drawn by time, is the only one whose prizes are worth taking up and carrying home.

Man is the jewel of God, who has created this material world to keep his treasure in.

Truth never yet fell dead in the streets; it has such affinity with the soul of man, the seed however broadcast will catch somewhere and produce its hundredfold.

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

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

The miser, poor fool, not only starves his body, but also his own soul.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Gratitude is a nice touch of beauty added last of all to the countenance. Giving a classic beauty, an angelic loveliness, to the character.

The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. A great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
1810-1860, Minister

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.

Humanity is the Son of God.

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.

Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect.

A democracy,- that is a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government of the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake I will call it the idea of Freedom.

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.

Nature is man's religious book, with lessons for every day.

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.

Science is the natural ally of religion.

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.

Great success is a great temptation.

To make one half the human race consume its energies in the functions of housekeeper, wife and mother is a monstrous waste of the most precious material God ever made.

There never was a great truth but it was reverenced; never a great institution, nor a great man, that did not, sooner or later, receive the reverence of mankind.

Magnificent promises are always to be suspected.

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.

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.