Quotes from Robert Green Ingersoll

Truth is the mother of joy. Truth civilizes, ennobles and purifies. The grandest ambition that can enter the soul is to know the truth.

I know of no crime that has not been defended by the church, in one form or other. The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless.

Commerce makes friends, religion makes enemies; the one enriches, and the other impoverishes; the one thrives best where the truth is told, the other where falsehoods are believed.

In the presence of death I affirm and reaffirm the truth of all that I have said against the superstitions of the world. I would say that much on the subject with my last breath.

Sacred are the lips from which has issued only truth.

It cannot be too often repeated, that truth scorns the assistance of miracle.

Every religion in the world has denounced every other religion as a fraud. That proves to me that they all tell the truth - about others.

Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.

Joy is wealth and love is the legal tender of the soul.

Love your friends and be just to your enemies.

The meanest hut with love in it is a palace fit for the gods, and a palace without love is a den only fit for wild beasts.

Character survives; goodness lives; love is immortal.

Kings had their clowns, the people their actors and musicians. Shakespeare was scheduled as a servant. It is thus that successful stupidity has always treated genius.

They knew that it was necessary to believe these things and to love God. They knew that there could be no salvation except by faith, and through the atoning blood of Jesus Christ.

The hands that help are better far / Than lips that pray. / Love is the ever gleaming star / That leads the way, / That shines, not on vague worlds of bliss, / But on a paradise in this.

Music was born of love. Had there never been any human affection, there never could have been uttered a strain of music.

In my judgment, the American people are too brave, too charitable, too generous, too magnanimous, to believe in the infamous dogma of an eternal hell.

Every man should be the intellectual proprietor of himself, honest with himself, and intellectually hospitable; and upon every brain, reason should be enthroned as king.

A good way to make children tell the truth is to tell it yourself. Keep your word with your child the same as you would with your banker.

Tolerance is giving to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself.

A great man does not seek applause or place; he seeks for truth; he seeks the road to happiness, and what he ascertains, he gives to others.

The truth is that all great men have had great mothers. Great women have had, as a rule, great fathers.

It seems to me that if there is some infinite being who wants us to think alike he would have made us alike.

If you wish to reflect credit upon your parents, accomplish more than they did, solve problems that they could not understand, and build better than they knew.