Quotes from James Martineau

All that is noble in the world's past history, and especially the minds of the great and the good, are never lost.

Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.

Grief is only the memory of widowed affections.

The scepticism which men affect towards their higher inspirations is often not an honest doubt, but a guilty negligence, and is a sign of narrow mind and defective wisdom.

Let the Great Shepherd lead; and by winding ways not without green pastures and still waters, we shall rise insensibly, and reach the tops of the everlasting hills, where the winds are cool and the sight is glorious.

The incarnation is true, not of Christ exclusively, but of Man universally, and God everlastingly.

We can neither change nor overpower God's eternal suffrage against selfishness and meanness.

Religion is the belief in an ever-living God, that is, in a Divine Mind and Will ruling the Universe and holding moral relations with mankind.

All that is noble in the world's past history, and especially the minds of the great and good, are, in like manner, never lost.

We are each of us responsible for the evil we may have prevented.

Grief is only the memory of widowed affections.

The heavens, with their everlasting faithfulness, look down on no sadder contradiction than the sluggard and the slattern in their prayers.

Religion is no more possible without prayer than poetry without language, or music without atmosphere.

The pinafore of the child will be more than a match for the frock of the bishop and the surplice of the priest.

There is no human life so poor and small as not to hold many a divine possibility.

We should count time by heart-throbs.

God has so arranged the chronometry of our spirits, that there shall be thousands of silent moments between the striking hours.

When speech is given to a soul holy and true, time, and its dome of ages, becomes as a mighty whispering-gallery, round which the imprisoned utterance runs, and reverberates forever.

All beneficent and creative power gathers itself together in silence, ere it issues out in might.

Every man's highest, nameless though it be, is his 'living God'.