Charles Kingsley Quotes

111 Sourced Quotes

I hope that my children, at least, if not I myself, will see the day when ignorance of the primary laws and facts of science will be looked upon as a defect only second to ignorance of the primary laws of religion and morality.

Charles Kingsley
Changeless march the stars above,
Changeless morn succeeds to even;
And the everlasting hills,
Changeless watch the changeless heaven.

Charles Kingsley
For to be discontented with the divine discontent, and to be ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ and first upgrowth of all virtue.

Charles Kingsley
For men must work, and women must weep,
And there's little to earn, and many to keep,
Though the harbor bar be moaning.

Charles Kingsley
Beauty is God's handwriting. Welcome it in every fair face, every fair day, every fair flower.

Charles Kingsley
All the ingenious men and all the scientific men in the world could never invent anything so curious and so ridiculous as a lobster.

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
Science frees us in many ways... from the bodily terror which the savage feels. But she replaces that, in the minds of many, by a moral terror which is far more overwhelming.

Charles Kingsley
They rowed her in across the rolling foam,
The cruel crawling foam,
The cruel hungry foam,
To her grave beside the sea:
But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home
Across the sands of Dee.

Charles Kingsley
The great fairy Science, who is likely to be queen of all the fairies for many a year to come, can only do you good, and never do you harm.

Charles Kingsley
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 among:—
God grant you find one face there,
You loved when all was young.

Charles Kingsley
Eustace is a man no longer; he is become a thing, a tool, a Jesuit.

Charles Kingsley
Welcome, wild North-easter!
Shame it is to see
Odes to every zephyr;
Ne'er a verse to thee.

Charles Kingsley
And the sooner it's over, the sooner to sleep—
And good-by to the bar and its moaning.

Charles Kingsley
So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.

Charles Kingsley
Every duty which is bidden to wait returns with seven fresh duties at its back.

Charles Kingsley
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
These rocks, at least, tell me no lies, as men do.

Charles Kingsley
So fleet the works of men, back to their earth again;Ancient and holy things fade like a dream.

Charles Kingsley
They say, man is the microcosm... but the man of science finds every worm and beetle a microcosm in its way. It exemplifies, directly or indirectly, every physical law in the universe, though it may not be two lines long. It is not only a part, but a mirror, of the great whole.

Charles Kingsley
Wise men know that their business is to examine what is, and not to settle what is not.

Charles Kingsley
The health of a church depends not merely on the creed which it professes, not even on the wisdom and holiness of a few great ecclesiastics, but on the faith and virtue of its individual members.

Charles Kingsley
Be sure, that wherever there is a river, or even a drain; and a stone quarry, or even a roadside bank; much more where there is a sea, or a tidal aestuary, there is geology enough to be learnt, to explain the greater part of the making of all the continents on the globe.

Charles Kingsley
The most important facts of geology do not require, to discover them, any knowledge of mathematics or of chemical analysis; they may be studied in every bank, every grot, every quarry, every railway-cutting, by anyone who has eyes and common sense.

Charles Kingsley
Nothing like one honest look, one honest thought of Christ upon His cross. That tells us how much He has been through, how much He endured, how much He conquered, how much God loved us, who spared not His only begotten Son, but freely gave Him for us. Dare we doubt such a God? Dare we murmur against such a God?

Charles Kingsley
The Roentgen Rays, The Roentgen Rays What is this craze, The town's ablaze, With the new phase of X-rays ways I'm full of daze, Shock and amaze, For nowadays, I hear they'll gaze, Thro' cloak and gown - and even stays, These naughty, naughty Roentgen Rays.

Charles Kingsley
I believe not only in "special providences," but in the whole universe as one infinite complexity of "special providences.

Charles Kingsley
Do not fancy, as too many do, that thou canst praise God by singing hymns to Him in church once a week, and disobeying Him all the week long. He asks of thee works as well as words; and more, he asks of thee works first and words after.

Charles Kingsley
Oh England is a pleasant place for them that's rich and high,
But England is a cruel place for such poor folks as I

Charles Kingsley
Pray over every truth; for though the renewed heart is not "desperately wicked," it is quite deceitful enough to become so, if God be forgotten a moment.

Charles Kingsley