Theodore Parker Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

Outward judgment often fails, inward judgment never.

Theodore Parker
Let others laugh when you sacrifice desire to duty, if they will. You have time and eternity to rejoice in.

Theodore Parker
If you lend me your ears, I shall doubtless take your hearts too. That I may not lead you into any wrong, let me warn you of this. Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect. Be true to your own mind and conscience, your heart and your soul. So only can you be true to God.

Theodore Parker
Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh. Famine and gluttony alike drive nature away from the heart of man.

Theodore Parker
It is very sad for a man to make himself servant to a single thing; his manhood all taken out of him by the hydraulic pressure of excessive business. — I should not like to be merely a great doctor, a great lawyer, a great minister, a great politician.—I should like to be, also, something of a man.

Theodore Parker
Man is the jewel of God, who has created this material world to keep his treasure in.

Theodore Parker
No virtue fades out of mankind. Not over-hopeful by inborn temperament, cautious by long experience, I yet never despair of human virtue.

Theodore Parker
He prays best who, not asking God to do man's work, prays penitence, prays resolutions, and then prays deeds--thus supplicating with heart and head and hands.

Theodore Parker
Wit has its place in debate; in controversy it is a legitimate weapon, offensive and defensive.

Theodore Parker
The coat of the buffalo never pinches under the arm, never puckers at the shoulders; it is always the same, yet never old fashioned nor out of date.

Theodore Parker
Silence is a figure of speech, unanswerable, short, cold, but terribly severe.

Theodore Parker
Be not familiar with the idea of wrong, for sin in fancy mothers many an ugly fact.

Theodore Parker
The whole sum and substance of human history may be reduced to this maxim: that when man departs from the divine means of reaching the divine end, he suffers harm and loss.

Theodore Parker
The union of men in large masses is indispensable to the development and rapid growth of the higher faculties of men. Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization whence light and heat radiated out into the dark cold world.

Theodore Parker
The lottery of honest labor, drawn by time, is the only one whose prizes are worth taking up and carrying home.

Theodore Parker
In all the world there is nothing so remarkable as a great man, nothing so rare, nothing which so well repays study.

Theodore Parker
Science is the natural ally of religion. Shall we try and separate what God has joined? We injure both by the attempt.

Theodore Parker
There is no intercessor, angel, mediator, between man and God; for man can speak and God hear, each for himself. He requires no advocates to plead for men.

Theodore Parker
What sad faces one always sees in the asylums for orphans! It is more fatal to neglect the heart than the head.

Theodore Parker
The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and "only infallible rule" of the nest.

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
The use of great men is to serve the little men, to take care of the human race, and act as practical interpreters of justice and truth.

Theodore Parker
What a joy is there in a good book, writ by some great master of thought, who breaks into beauty as in summer the meadow into grass and dandelions and violets, with geraniums and manifold sweetness.

Theodore Parker
To obtain a knowledge of duty, a man is not sent away, outside of himself, to ancient documents; for the only rule of faith a practice, the Word, is very nigh him, even in his heart, and by this word he is to try all documents.

Theodore Parker
Temperance is corporeal piety; it is the preservation of divine order in the body.

Theodore Parker
Yet, if he would, man cannot live all to this world. If not religious, he will be superstitious. IF he worship not the true God, he will have his idols.

Theodore Parker
Love of truth will bless the lover all his days; yet when he brings her home, his fair-faced bride, she comes empty-handed to his door, herself her only dower.

Theodore Parker
The great man is to be the servant of mankind, not they of him.

Theodore Parker
It is vain to trust in wrong; as much of evil, so much of loss, is the formula of human history.

Theodore Parker
Justice is the idea of God, the ideal of man, the rule of conduct writ in the nature of mankind.

Theodore Parker