Quotes from 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.

No man is so great as mankind.

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

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

Genius is the father of a heavenly line, but the mortal mother, that is industry.

Want and wealth equally harden the human heart, as frost and fire are both alien to the human flesh. Famine and gluttony alike drive away nature from the heart of man.

Nature is God's Old Testament.

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

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.

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

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.

All the spaces between my mind and the mind of God are full of truths waiting to be crystallized into laws for the government of the masses.

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.

Democracy is direct self-government over all the people for all the people by all the people.

Humanity is the sin of God

Humanity is the Son of God.

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

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart.

Religion without joy-it is no religion.

Applying good sense to religion and religion to life. This is the field in which I design to labor

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

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization, whence light and heat radiated out into the dark.