Theodore Parker quotes:

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

Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart.

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.

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.

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.

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

Humanity is the sin of God.

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.

Outward judgment often fails, inward judgment never.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

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.

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

Remorse is the pain of sin.

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

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

Disappointment is often the salt of life.

[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.

What sad faces one always sees in the asylums for orphans! It is more fatal to neglect the heart than the head.

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.

A happy wedlock is a long falling in love.

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.

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.

As society advances the standard of poverty rises.

No man is so great as mankind.

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

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 books that help you the most are those which make you think the most.

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.

[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.

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

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.

All men desire to be immortal.

All men need something to poetize and idealize their life a little-something which they value for more than its use, and which is a symbol of their emancipation from the mere materialism and drudgery of daily life.

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.

And war-the worst form of evil!

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

Be not familiar with the idea of wrong, for sin in fancy mothers many an ugly fact.

Democracy is direct self-government over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.

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

Did the mass of men know the actual selfishness and injustice of their rulers, not a government would stand a year. - The world would foment with revolution.

Every man has at times in his mind the ideal of what he should be, but is not. This ideal may be high and complete, or it may be quite low and insufficient; yet in all men that really seek to improve, it is better than the actual character. * * * Man never falls so low that he can see nothing higher than himself.

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.

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.

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

Genius is the father of a heavenly line, but the mortal mother, that is industry.

Great success is a great temptation.

Greatness is its own torment.

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.

Humanity is the sin of God

Humanity is the Son of God.

I am conscious of eternal life.

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

I look through the grave into heaven.

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.

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

Intellect is stronger than cannon.

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

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.

It takes a Newton to forge a Newton. What man could have fabricated a Jesus? None but a Jesus.

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

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.

Love is the piety of the affections.

Magnificent promises are always to be suspected.

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.

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

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

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.

Marriages are best made of dissimilar material.

Nature is God's Old Testament.

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

Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect. Be true to your own mind and conscience, your heart and your soul. So only can you be true to God.

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

Pride is both a virtue and a vice.

Religion without joy-it is no religion.

Science is the natural ally of religion.

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

Silence is a figure of speech, unanswerable, short, cold, but terribly severe.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and "only infallible rule" of the nest.

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

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

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

The most useful is the greatest.

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 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.

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.

There is no college for the conscience.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Who escapes a duty, avoids a gain.

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

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.

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