Charles Kingsley (1819–75) was an English writer and Anglican priest who wrote many historical novels, including Hypatia (1853,) Hereward the Wake (1865) and Westward Ho (1855.)
Kingsley is best remembered for his popular children’s book The Water-Babies (1863,) written to teach unconditional love, redemption, and other Christian values. The Water-Babies is an allegorical fairytale of a 10-year-old, chimney-sweeping orphan named Tom. While clearing soot one day, Tom falls through a chimney into the room of a rich young girl named Ellie. Mistaken for a thief, Tom is chased out of town. Overwhelmed by exhaustion, he submits to thirst, tumbles into a stream, falls fast asleep, and drowns. Fairies turn him into a peculiar creature called a “water-baby.” In his new life, Tom meets various fairies, aquatic creatures, and other water-babies. When he reaches the Other-End-of-Nowhere, he helps his vicious former master Mr. Grimes find repentance.
The Water-Babies was extremely popular when it was published, and it helped rally support for the 1840 Chimney Sweepers’ Regulation Act, which prohibited the use of child labor to climb into and clean chimneys.
However, The Water-Babies lost its popularity over time because of its insults against the Irish, Catholics, Jews, Americans, and the poor, even if Kingsley’s writing merely reflected many of the prevailing prejudices of his time.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Charles Kingsley
Do today’s duty, fight today’s temptation; do not weaken and distract yourself by looking forward to things you cannot see, and could not understand if you saw them.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: The Present, Present, Work, Duty
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.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Books, Reading
The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.
—Charles Kingsley
Stick to the old truths and the old paths, and learn their divineness by sick beds, and in everyday work, and do not darken your mind with intellectual puzzles, which may breed disbelief, but can never breed vital religion or practical usefulness.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Truth
What I want is, not to possess religion, but to have a religion that shall possess me.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Religion
There are two freedoms—the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Freedom, Liberty
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.
When all the world is old, lad,
And all the trees are brown;
And all the sport is stale, lad,
And all the wheels run down;
Creep home, and take your place there,
The spent and maimed amoung:
God grant you find one face there,
You loved when all was young.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Age
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.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Religion
What’s the use of doing a kindness, if you do it a day too late.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Kindness, Service, Compassion
Nothing is so infectious as example.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Example
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.
—Charles Kingsley
Feelings are like chemicals; the more you analyze them the worse they smell.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Feelings
Do noble things, do not dream them all day long.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Inaction, Action, Getting Going, Procrastination
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.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Style
Do what thou dost as if the earth were heaven, and thy last day the day of judgment.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Labor
There is a great deal of human nature in man.
—Charles Kingsley
I go at what I am about a if there was nothing else in the world for the time being.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Concentration, Focus
He was one of those men who possess almost every gift, except the gift of the power to use them.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Common Sense
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.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Excellence, Work
Beauty is God’s handwriting.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Beauty, God, One liners
There is something very wonderful about music. Words are wonderful enough; but music is even more wonderful. It speaks not to our thoughts as words do; it speaks through our hearts and spirits, to the very core and root of our souls. Music soothes us, stirs us up, it puts noble feelings in us, it can make us cringe; and it can melt us to tears; and yet we have no idea how. It is a language by itself, just as perfect in its ways as speech, as words, just as divine, just as blessed.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Music
All natural objects … all forms, colours, and scents … are types of some spiritual truth or existence.’
—Charles Kingsley
Nothing is more expensive than penuriousness, nothing more anxious than carelessness, and every duty which is bidden to wait returns with seven fresh duties at its back.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Duty, Procrastination
So fleet the works of men, back to their earth again;Ancient and holy things fade like a dream.
—Charles Kingsley
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.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Goals, Enthusiasm, Luxury, Joy, Passion, Love, Happiness, Life, Happy, Aspirations
The men whom I have seen succeed best in life always have 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.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Hope
As the rays come from the sun, and yet are not the sun, even so our love and pity, though they are not God, but merely a poor, weak image and reflection of Him, yet from him alone they come.
—Charles Kingsley
No earnest thinker is a plagiarist pure and simple. He will never borrow from others that which he has not already, more or less, thought out for himself.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Plagiarism
Make a rule, and pray to God to help you to keep it, never, if possible, to lie down at night without being able to say: “I have made one human being at least a little wiser, or a little happier, or at least a little better this day.”
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Kindness
Except a living man. there is nothing more wonderful than a book! a message to us 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, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Books, Reading
We have used the Bible as if it were a mere special constable’s handbook, an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they are overloaded.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Bible
We shall be made truly wise if we be made content; content, too, not only with what we can understand, but content with what we do not understand-the habit of mind which theologians call, and rightly, faith in God.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Contentment
Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do which must be done, whether you like it or not.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Gratitude, Blessings
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.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Duty
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.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Selfishness, Misery
The world goes up and the world goes down, the sunshine follows the rain; and yesterday’s sneer and yesterday’s frown can never come over again.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Rain, Change
Study nature as the countenance of God.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Nature
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