Disappointment is often the salt of life.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Disappointment, One liners
[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.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Nation
The man of the true quality is not he who labels himself with genealogical tables, and lives on the reputation of his fathers, but he in whose conversation and behavior there are references and characteristics positively unaccountable except on the hypothesis that his descent is pure and illustrious.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Ancestry
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.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Heart
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.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Man
Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Self-respect, Self Respect
Politics is the science of exigencies.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Politicians, Politics
A life merely of pleasure, or chiefly of pleasure, is always a poor and worthless life, not worth the living; always unsatisfactory in its course, always miserable in its end.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Pleasure
Every rose is an autograph from the hand of God on his world about us.—He has inscribed his thoughts in these marvellous hieroglyphics which sense and science have, these many thousand years, been seeking to understand.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Flowers
A nation’s welfare depends on its ability to master the world; that on its power of work; and that on its power of thought.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Work
The earnestness of life is the only passport to the satisfaction of life.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Life
It is not from the tall, crowded work house of prosperity that men first or clearest see the eternal stars of heaven.
—Theodore Parker
Justice is the idea of God; the ideal of men; the rule of conduct writ in the nature of mankind.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Justice
This is what I call the American idea of freedom—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.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Freedom
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.
—Theodore Parker
You and I toiling for earth, may at the same time be toiling for heaven, and every day’s work may be a Jacob’s ladder reaching up nearer to God.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Labor
Let men laugh, if they will, when you sacrifice desire to duty.—You have time and eternity to rejoice in.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Duty
The union of men in large masses is indispensable to the development and rapid growth of their higher faculties.—Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization, whence light and heat radiated out into the dark, cold world.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Cities
Every man has, at times, in his mind the ideal of what he should be, but is not. In all men that seek to improve, it is better than the actual character.—No one is so satisfied with himself that he never wishes to be wiser, better, and more holy.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Ideals
The lottery of honest labor, drawn by time, is the only one whose prizes are worth taking up and carrying home.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Labor
Thought convinces; feeling persuades.—If imagination furnishes the fact with wings, feeling is the great, stout muscle which plies them, and lifts him from the ground.—Thought sees beauty; emotion feels it.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Imagination
Temperance is corporal piety; it is the preservation of divine order in the body.
—Theodore Parker
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.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Progress
The joys of heaven will begin as soon as we attain the character of heaven and do its duties.—Try that and prove its truth.—As much goodness and piety, so much heaven.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Heaven
Magnificent promises are always to be suspected.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Promise
Outward judgment often fails, inward judgment never.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Judges, Judgement, Judging, Peace, Judgment
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.
—Theodore Parker
Silence is a figure of speech, unanswerable, short, cold, but terribly severe.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Silence
Let your pleasures be taken as Daniel took his prayer, with his windows open—pleasures which need not cause a single blush on an ingenuous cheek.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Pleasure
Marriages are best made of dissimilar material.
—Theodore Parker
Topics: Marriage
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