Quotes from Charles Kingsley

Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.

To be discontented with the divine discontent, and to be ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ of the first upgrowth of all virtue.

If you want to be miserable, think about yourself; about what you want, what you like, what respect people ought to pay you, what people think of you; and then to you nothing will be pure. You will spoil everything you touch; you will make sin and misery for yourself out of everything God sends you; you will be as wretched as you choose.

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.

Those clouds are angels' robes.

See the land, her Easter keeping, Rises as her Maker rose. Seeds, so long in darkness sleeping, Burst at last from winter snows. Earth with heaven above rejoices...

Oh Mary, go and call the cattle home…Across the sands of Dee.

And the sooner it's over, the sooner to sleep;And good-bye to the bar and its moaning.

When all the world is young, lad,And all the trees are green;And every goose a swan, lad,And every lass a queen;Then hey for boot and horse, lad,And round the world away:Young blood must have its course, lad,And every dog his day.

There is a great deal of human nature in man.

Every duty which is bidden to wait returns with seven fresh duties at its back.

Have thy tools ready. God will find thee work.

He was one of those men who possess almost every gift, except the gift of the power to use them.

For men must work, and women must weep,And there's little to earn and many to keep,Though the harbor bar be moaning.

Give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me… signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe.

There are two freedoms — the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements in life, when all we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

It is only the great hearted who can be true friends. The mean and cowardly, Can never know what true friendship means.

[E]very winter, When the great sun has turned his face away, The earth goes down into the vale of grief, And fasts, and weeps, and shrouds herself in sables, Leaving her wedding-garlands to decay— Then leaps in spring to his returning kisses...

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting.

Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book! A message to us from the dead, — from human souls whom we never saw, who lived perhaps thousands of miles away; and yet these, on those little sheets of paper, speak to us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers.

Every winter, When the great sun has turned his face away, The earth goes down into a vale of grief, And fasts, and weeps, and shrouds herself in sables, Leaving her wedding-garlands to decay-- Then leaps in spring to his returning kisses.

Look at the bow in the cloud, in the very rain itself. That is a sign that the sun, though you cannot see it, is shining still -- that up above beyond the cloud is still sunlight and warmth and cloudless blue sky.

The world goes up and the world goes down, the sunshine follows the rain; and yesterday's sneer and yesterday's frown can never come over again.