Charles Kingsley Quotes

111 Sourced Quotes

I found him in a room lined with cabinets of curiosities, and hung all over with strange horns, bones, and slabs of fossils. But I was not allowed much time to look about me; for he commenced at once on the subject of my studies, by asking me whether I was willing to prepare myself for the university by entering on the study of mathematics?

Charles Kingsley
Gradually the sunken land begins to rise again, and falls perhaps again, and rises again after that, more and more gently each time, till as it were the panting earth, worn out with the fierce passions of her fiery youth, has sobbed herself to sleep once more, and this new world of man is made.

Charles Kingsley
Madame Nature allows no dangerous classes, in the modern sense. She has, doubtless for some wise reason, no mercy for the weak. She rewards each organism according to its works; and if anything grows too weak or stupid to take care of itself, she gives it its due deserts by letting it die and disappear.

Charles Kingsley
There will be no true freedom without virtue, no true science without religion, no true industry without the fear of God and love to your fellow citizens.

Charles Kingsley
The fact is novel, and I am more obliged to any one who gives me that, than if he gave me a bank-note. The money gets spent and done with; but I cannot spend the fact: it remains for life as permanent capital, returning interest and compound interest ad infinitum.

Charles Kingsley
Universal laws manifest themselves only by particular instances.

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
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
Oh! that we two were Maying
Down the stream of the soft spring breeze;
Like children with violets playing,
In the shade of the whispering trees.

Charles Kingsley
Mathematical knowledge is not-as all Cambridge men are surely aware-the result of any special gift. It is merely the development of those conceptions of form and number which every human being possesses; and any person of average intellect can make himself a fair mathematician if he will only pay continuous attention; in plain English, think enough about the subject.

Charles Kingsley
Whatever may be the mysteries of life and death, there is one mystery which the cross of Christ reveals to us, and that is the infinite and absolute goodness of God. Let all the rest remain a mystery so long as the mystery of the cross of Christ gives us faith for all the rest.

Charles Kingsley
It's all in the day's work, as the huntsman said when the lion ate him.

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
Natural Science is a subject which a man cannot learn by paying for teachers. He must teach it himself, by patient observation, by patient common sense.

Charles Kingsley
I do not see why we should not be as just to an ant as to a human being.

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

Charles Kingsley
All who have travelled through the delicious scenery of North Devon must needs know the little white town of Bideford, which slopes upwards from its broad tide-river paved with yellow sands, and many-arched old bridge, where salmon wait for Autumn floods, toward the pleasant upland on the west.

Charles Kingsley
Our wanton accidents take root, and grow To vaunt themselves God's laws.

Charles Kingsley
Are gods more ruthless than mortals? Have they no mercy for youth? no love for the souls who have loved them?

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
Do the work that's nearest,
Though it's dull at whiles,
Helping, when we meet them,
Lame dogs over stiles.

Charles Kingsley
A great man of science... knows everything about everything, except why a hen's egg don't turn into a crocodile, and two or three other little things.

Charles Kingsley
Still the race of hero spirits pass the lamp from hand to hand.

Charles Kingsley
A scientific man must expect his little disappointments and injustices. If you were behind the scenes in the scientific world, I can assure you, you would find as much party-spirit, and unfairness, and jealousy, and emulation there, as anywhere else. Human nature, human nature, everywhere!

Charles Kingsley
A man may learn from his Bible to be a more thorough gentleman than if he had been brought up in all the drawing-rooms in London.

Charles Kingsley