Inspirational Quotes by Tryon Edwards (American Theologian)

Accuracy of statement is one of the first elements of truth; inaccuracy is a near kin to falsehood.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Facts, Truth

Think as well as read, and when you read. Yield not your minds to the passive impressions which others may make upon them. Hear what they have to say; but examine it, weigh it, and judge for yourselves. This will enable you to make a right use of books—to use them as helpers, not as guides to your understanding; as counselors, not as dictators of what you are to think and believe.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Reading

Give work rather than alms to the poor. The former drives out indolence, the latter industry.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Charity

All the world’s ends, arrangements changes, disappointments, hopes, and fears, are without meaning, if not seen and estimated by eternity!
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: World

No one can contemplate the great facts of astronomy without feeling his own littleness and the wonderful sweep of the power and providence of God.
—Tryon Edwards

Few men are more to be shunned than those who have time, but know not how to improve it, and so spend it in wasting the time of their neighbors, talking forever though they have nothing to say.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Bores

When a tradesman is about to weigh his goods, he first of all looks to his scales and sees that his weights are right. And so for all wise, or safe, or profitable self-examination, we are not to look to frames, or feelings, or to the conduct of others, but to God’s word, which is the only true standard of decision.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Self-improvement

Men sometimes affect to deny the depravity of our race; but it is as clearly taught in the lawyers’ office and in courts of justice, as in the Bible itself.—Every prison, and fetter, and scaffold, and bolt, and bar, and chain is evidence that man believes in the depravity of man.
—Tryon Edwards

Profanity is both an unreasonable and an unmanly sin, a violation alike of good taste and good morals; an offence against both man and God.—Some sins are productive of temporary profit or pleasure; but profaneness is productive of nothing unless it be shame on earth, and damnation in hell. It is the most gratuitous of all kinds of wickedness—a sort of pepper-corn acknowledgment of the sovereignty of the devil over those who indulge it.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Profanity

If we make God’s will our law, then God’s promise shall be our support and comfort, and we shall find every burden light, and every duty a joy.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Will

Preventives of evil are far better than remedies; cheaper and easier of application, and surer in result.
—Tryon Edwards

Much of the glory and sublimity of truth is connected with its mystery.—To understand everything we must be as God.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Truth

The religions we count false, may, for a time, have had their use; being, in their origin, faint, though misunderstood echoes of an early divine revelation, and also as Emerson says. “affirmations of the conscience, correcting the evil customs of their times.”
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Religion

Between two evils, choose neither; between two goods, choose both.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Evil, Choice, Goodness

High aims form high characters, and great objects bring out great minds.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: AIDS

Indolence is the dry rot of even a good mind and a good character; the practical uselessness of both. It is the waste of what might be a happy and useful life.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Laziness

God is infinitely great in himself; we should recognize it in humble adoration: always good; we should acknowledge it by grateful thanksgiving: we have constant need of his blessings; it becomes us to ask them at his hand.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Prayer

A sound mind in a sound body; if the former be the glory of the latter, the latter is indispensable to the former.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Health

There are many times and circumstances in life when “Our strength is, to sit still.”
—Tryon Edwards

Laws which are in advance of public sentiment are generally but a dead letter.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Law

Happiness is like manna; it is to be gathered in grains, and enjoyed every day. It will not keep; it cannot be accumulated; nor have we got to go out of ourselves or into remote places to gather it, since it has rained down from Heaven, at our very doors.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Happiness

Anxiety is the rust of life, destroying its brightness and weakening its power. A childlike and abiding trust in Providence is its best preventive and remedy.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Anxiety, Anger

He that never changes his opinion never corrects mistakes and will never be wiser on the morrow than he is today.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Change, Opinions, Wisdom, Opinion

Thoroughly to teach another is the best way to learn for yourself.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Teaching

Common sense is, of all kinds, the most uncommon.—It implies good judgment, sound discretion, and true and practical wisdom applied to common life.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Common Sense

Emotion which does not lepd to and flow out in right action is not only useless, but it weakens character, and be comes an excuse for neglect of effort.
—Tryon Edwards

We never do evil so thoroughly and heartily as when led to it by an honest but perverted, because mistaken, conscience.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Conscience

People never improve unless they look to some standard or example higher and better than themselves.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Progress, Self-improvement, Example, Role models

Fables, like parables, are more ancient than formal arguments and are often the most effective means of presenting and impressing both truth and duty.
—Tryon Edwards

We weep over the graves of infants and the little ones taken from us by death; but an early grave may be the shortest way to heaven.
—Tryon Edwards

Commerce has made all winds her messengers; all climes her tributaries; all people her servants.
—Tryon Edwards

Seek happiness for its own sake, and you will not find it; seek for duty, and happiness will follow as the shadow comes with the sunshine.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Happiness

The hunger and thirst of immortality is upon the human soul, filling it with aspirations and desires for higher and better things than the world can give.—We can never be fully satisfied but in God.
—Tryon Edwards

He is one of the noblest conquerors who carries on a successful warfare against his own appetites and passions, and has them under wise and full control.
—Tryon Edwards

Of all our losses, those delay doth cause, are most and heaviest.—By it oft we lose the richest treasures, knowledge, wealth, and power, and oft, alas! the never dying soul.—The calls of God and duty we intend to hear, at some convenient season, which to us may never come.—And thus we madly waste probation, forfeit heaven, and heedless sink to endless death.
—Tryon Edwards

Change of opinion is often only the progress of sound thought and growing knowledge; and though sometimes regarded as an inconsistency, it is but the noble inconsistency natural to a mind ever ready for growth and expansion of thought, and that never fears to follow where truth and duty may lead the way.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Opinion

Names, says an old maxim, “are things.”—They certainly are influences.—Impressions are left and opinions are shaped by them.—Virtue is disparaged, and vice countenanced, and so encouraged by them. The mean and selfish talk of their prudence and economy; the vain and proud prate about self-respect; obstinacy is called firmness, and dissipation the enjoyment of life; seriousness is ridiculed as cant, and strict morality and integrity, as needless scrupulosity; and so men deceive themselves, and society is led to look leniently, or with indifference, on what ought to be sharply condemned.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Names

What we need in religion, is not new light, but new sight; not new paths, but new strength to walk in the old ones; not new duties, but new strength from on high to fulfill those that are plain before us.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Religion

Prayer is as much the instinct of my nature as a Christian, as it is a duty enjoined by the command of God. It is my language of worship, as a man; of dependence, as a creature; of submission, as a subject; of confession, as a sinner; of thankfulness, as the recipient of mercies; of supplication, as a needy being.
—Tryon Edwards
Topics: Prayer

Constancy to truth and principle may sometimes lead to what the world calls inconstancy in conduct.
—Tryon Edwards

Wondering Whom to Read Next?

• Reinhold Niebuhr American Theologian
• Archibald Alexander Hodge American Presbyterian Theologian
• Anthony de Mello Indian-born American Theologian
• Paul Tillich American Lutheran Theologian
• Samuel Rutherford Scottish Presbyterian Theologian
• George Matheson Scottish Theologian
• Conyers Middleton English Clergyman
• Karl Barth Swiss Protestant Theologian
• Johann Jacob Zimmermann German Nonconformist Theologian
• Henry Liddon English Theologian