Quotes from Theodore Parker

As society advances the standard of poverty rises.

Great success is a great temptation.

What succeeds we keep, and it becomes the habit of mankind.

I ask no risen dust to teach me immortality; I am conscious of eternal life.

I am conscious of eternal life.

The lottery of honest labor, drawn by time, is the only one whose prizes are worth taking up and carrying home.

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

A happy wedlock is a long falling in love.

Disappointment is often the salt of life.

It is vain to trust in wrong; as much of evil, so much of loss, is the formula of human history.

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.

There never was a great truth but it was reverenced; never a great institution, nor a great man, that did not, sooner or later, receive the reverence of mankind.

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

Love of truth will bless the lover all his days; yet when he brings her home, his fair-faced bride, she comes empty-handed to his door, herself her only dower.

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

Remorse is the pain of sin.

Love is the piety of the affections.

Did not Jesus say, resist not evil — with evil? Is not war the worst form of that evil.

Such a large sweet fruit is a complete marriage, that it needs a very long summer to ripen in and then a long winter to mellow and season it.

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

Truth never yet fell dead in the streets; it has such affinity with the soul of man, the seed however broadcast will catch somewhere and produce its hundredfold.

Did the mass of men know the actual selfishness and injustice of their rulers, not a government would stand a year. - The world would foment with revolution.

The great man is to be the servant of mankind, not they of him.

It is not from the tall crowded workhouse of prosperity that men first or clearest see the eternal stars of heaven.