Maturin Ballou - Pearls of Thought

Children are excellent physiognomists and soon discover their real friends. Luttrell calls them all lunatics, and so in fact they are. What is childhood but a series of happy delusions? — Sydney Smith.

The clew of our destiny, wander where we will, lies at the cradle foot. — Richter.

A house is never perfectly furnished for enjoyment unless there is a child in it rising three years old, and a kitten rising three weeks. — Southey.

Children have more need of models than of critics. — Joubert.

The bearing and training of a child is woman's wisdom. — Tennyson.

One of the greatest pleasures of childhood is found in the mysteries which it hides from the skepticism of the elders, and works up into small mythologies of its own. — Holmes.

Do not shorten the beautiful veil of mist covering childhood's futurity, by too hastily drawing away; but permit that joy to be of early commencement and of long duration, which lights up life so beautifully. The longer the morning dew remains hanging in the blossoms of flowers, the more beautiful the day. — Richter.

Where children are there is the golden age. — Novalis.

In the man whose childhood has known caresses there is always a fibre of memory that can be touched to gentle issues. — George Eliot.

The first duty towards children is to make them happy. If you have not made them happy, you have wronged them; no other good they may get can make up for that. — Charles Buxton.

Christ.– Our religion sets before us, not the example of a stupid stoic who had by obstinate principles hardened himself against all sense of pain beyond the common measures of humanity, but an example of a man like ourselves, that had a tender sense of the least suffering, and yet patiently endured the greatest. — Tillotson.

However consonant to reason his precepts appeared, nothing could have tempted men to acknowledge him as their God and Saviour but their being firmly persuaded of the miracles he wrought. — Addison.

Imitate Jesus Christ. — Franklin.

The history of Christ is as surely poetry as it is history, and in general, only that history is history which might also be fable. — Novalis.

Christianity.– Christianity is within a man, even as he is gifted with reason; it is associated with your mother's chair, and with the first remembered tones of her blessed voice. — Coleridge.

There was never law, or sect, or opinion, did so much magnify goodness as the Christian religion doth. — Bacon.

No religion ever appeared in the world whose natural tendency was so much directed to promote the peace and happiness of mankind. It makes right reason a law in every possible definition of the word. And therefore, even supposing it to have been purely a human invention, it had been the most amiable and the most useful invention that was ever imposed on mankind for their good. — Lord Bolingbroke.

Far beyond all other political powers of Christianity is the demiurgic power of this religion over the kingdoms of human opinion. — De Quincey.

Christianity is the companion of liberty in all its conflicts, – the cradle of its infancy and the divine source of its claims. — De Tocqueville.

Nature never gives to a living thing capacities not particularly meant for its benefit and use. If nature gives to us capacities to believe that we have a Creator whom we never saw, of whom we have no direct proof, who is kind and good and tender beyond all that we know of kindness and goodness and tenderness on earth, it is because the endowment of capacities to conceive a Being must be for our benefit and use; it would not be for our benefit and use if it were a lie. — Bulwer-Lytton.

A man can no more be a Christian without facing evil and conquering it than he can be a soldier without going to battle, facing the cannon's mouth, and encountering the enemy in the field. — Chapin.

There was never found in any age of the world, either philosophy, or sect or religion, or law or discipline, which did so highly exalt the good of communion, and depress good private and particular, as the holy Christian faith: hence it clearly appears that it was one and the same God that gave the Christian law to men who gave those laws of nature to the creatures. — Bacon.

Christianity is intensely practical. She has no trait more striking than her common sense. — Charles Buxton.

Christianity ruined emperors, but saved peoples. It opened the palaces of Constantinople to the barbarians, but it opened the doors of cottages to the consoling angels of the Saviour. — Alfred de Musset.

Always put the best interpretation on a tenet. Why not on Christianity, wholesome, sweet, and poetic? It is the record of a pure and holy soul, humble, absolutely disinterested, a truth-speaker, and bent on serving, teaching, and uplifting men. Christianity taught the capacity, the element, to love the All-perfect without a stingy bargain for personal happiness. It taught that to love him was happiness, – to love him in others' virtues. — Emerson.

Christian faith is a grand cathedral with divinely pictured windows. Standing without, you see no glory nor can possibly imagine any; standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors. — Hawthorne.

Christians are like the several flowers in a garden, that have each of them the dew of heaven, which, being shaken with the wind, they let fall at each other's roots, whereby they are jointly nourished, and become nourishers of each other. — Bunyan.

Church.– The Church is a union of men arising from the fellowship of religious life; a union essentially independent of, and differing from, all other forms of human association. — Rev. Dr. Neander.

A place where misdevotion frames a thousand prayers to saints. — Donne.

She may still exist in undiminished vigor, when some traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London bridge, to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's. — Macaulay.

Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind. — Burke.

God never had a house of prayer but Satan had a chapel there. — De Foe.

The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls, and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies. Those who are taken into it live like pensioners in their Retreat or Sailors' Snug Harbor, where you may see a row of religious cripples sitting outside in sunny weather. — Thoreau.

Circumstances.– Circumstances are the rulers of the weak; they are but the instruments of the wise. — Samuel Lover.

What saves the virtue of many a woman is that protecting god, the impossible. — Balzac.

Civilization.– Mankind's struggle upwards, in which millions are trampled to death, that thousands may mount on their bodies. — Mrs. Balfour.

The old Hindoo saw, in his dream, the human race led out to its various fortunes. First men were in chains which went back to an iron hand. Then he saw them led by threads from the brain, which went upward to an unseen hand. The first was despotism, iron and ruling by force. The last was civilization, ruling by ideas. — Wendell Phillips.

Nations, like individuals, live and die; but civilization cannot die. — Mazzini.

Clergymen.– The life of a conscientious clergyman is not easy. I have always considered a clergyman as the father of a larger family than he is able to maintain. I would rather have Chancery suits upon my hands than the cure of souls. I do not envy a clergyman's life as an easy life, nor do I envy the clergyman who makes it an easy life. — Johnson.