Theodore Parker Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

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

Theodore Parker
Outward judgment often fails, inward judgment never.

Theodore Parker
Gratitude is a nice touch of beauty added last of all to the countenance. Giving a classic beauty, an angelic loveliness, to the character.

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

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

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

Theodore Parker
Truth stood on one side and Ease on the other; it has often been so.

Theodore Parker
Man naturally loves justice, for its own sake, as the natural object of his conscience. As the mind loves truth and beauty, so conscience loves the right; it is true and beautiful to the moral faculties. Conscience rests in justice as an end, as the mind in truth. As truth is the side of God turned towards the intellect, so is justice the side of Him which conscience looks upon. Love of justice is the moral part of piety.

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
Science, also, is most largely indebted to these beauty-loving Greeks, for truth is one form of loveliness.

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
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
Every man has at times in his mind the Ideal of what he should be, but is not. This ideal may be high and complete, or it may be quite low and insufficient; yet in all men, that really seek to improve, it is better than the actual character. Perhaps no one is satisfied with himself, so that he never wishes to be wiser, better, and more holy. Man never falls so low, that he can see nothing higher than himself.

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

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

Theodore Parker
It takes a Newton to forge a Newton. What man could have fabricated a Jesus? None but a Jesus.

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

Theodore Parker
A democracy—that is 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; for shortness' sake I will call it the idea of Freedom.

Theodore Parker