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
Feelings are like chemicals; the more you analyze them the worse they smell.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Feelings
There is a great deal of human nature in man.
—Charles Kingsley
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
So fleet the works of men, back to their earth again; Ancient and holy things fade like a dream.
—Charles Kingsley
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
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: Misery, Selfishness
All natural objects … all forms, colours, and scents … are types of some spiritual truth or existence.
—Charles Kingsley
Nothing is so infectious as example.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Example
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
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: Procrastination, Duty
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: Change, Rain
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
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
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: Blessings, Gratitude
Beauty is God’s handwriting.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: One liners, God, Beauty
Do what thou dost as if the earth were heaven, and thy last day the day of judgment.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Labor
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
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
What I want is, not to possess religion, but to have a religion that shall possess me.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Religion
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
Do noble things, do not dream them all day long.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Procrastination, Inaction, Getting Going, Action
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
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: Reading, Books
The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.
—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: Present, Work, The Present, Duty
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
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
I go at what I am about as if there was nothing else in the world for the time being.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Focus, Concentration
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: Passion, Happy, Love, Goals, Aspirations, Happiness, Joy, Enthusiasm, Life, Luxury
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Robert Bolton English Clergyman
- Conyers Middleton English Clergyman
- John Wilkins British Clergyman, Scholar
- William Ralph Inge English Anglican Clergyman
- John Henry Newman British Theologian, Poet
- Ouida (Maria Louise Rame) English Novelist
- A. C. Benson English Essayist
- Charles Reade British Author
- Frederick Buechner American Writer, Theologian
- C. Northcote Parkinson British Historian
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