36 quotes
The facts of man's history do not fully represent the faculties of his nature as the history of matter represents the qualities of matter.
Ten Sermons of Religion (1853)
It is very sad for a man to make himself servant to a single thing; his manhood all taken out of him by the hydraulic pressure of excessive business.
Eternity is the life-time of Truth.
Two Sermons (1853)
The Republican Party has naught to say against property in man, but allows a minority to own a majority in South Carolina. The American Church is the stanchest supporter of American slavery.
There is what I call the American idea.
All men desire to be immortal.
Man naturally loves justice, for its own sake, as the natural object of his conscience. As the mind loves truth and beauty, so conscience loves the right; it is true and beautiful to the moral faculties.
Ten Sermons of Religion (1853)
Justice is the constitution or fundamental law of the moral universe, the law of right, a rule of conduct for man in all his moral relations.
Ten Sermons of Religion (1853)
Observation and reflection only give us the actual of morals; conscience, by gradual and successive intuition, presents us the ideal of morals.
Ten Sermons of Religion (1853)
It is common also to censure some one class of men — the rich or the educated, the manufacturers, the merchants, or the politicians, for example — as if the sin rested solely with them, while it belongs to society at large.
The Roman Christian mythology (and theology) discourages the vice of licentiousness, and so this is better than the heathen, but it encourages bigotry, hypocrisy, cant, and many another vice which the older Mother of Abominations kept clear from.
As quoted in Dictionary of American maxims (1955) edited by David George Plotkin.
Remorse is the pain of sin.
Man a revelation of God (1888)
The people are not satisfied with any form of government, or statute law, until it comes up to their sense of justice; so every progressive State revises its statutes from time to time, and at each revision comes nearer to the absolute right which human nature demands.
Ten Sermons of Religion (1853)
There is what I call the American idea … a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people; of course, a government after the principles of eternal justice, the unchanging law of God; for shortness' sake, I will call it the idea of Freedom.
Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.
Ten Sermons of Religion (1853)