C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Charles H. Parkhurst
A man’s longest purposes will be his best purposes. It is true, life is short and uncertain; but it is better to live on the short arc of a large circle than to describe the whole circumference of a small circle.
All great discoveries are made by men whose feelings run ahead of their thinkings.
All true manliness grows around a core of divineness.
And let me say only this one word more: that the little things that a little Christian does are not overlooked any more than the larger things that an older Christian does.
Contentment with to-day’s lot makes candidacy for a better lot to-morrow.
Curiosity is thought on its entering edge.
Every thought was once a poem.
Faith is among men what gravity is among planets and suns.
Faith is the heroism of intellect.
Faith is the very heroism and enterprise of intellect. Faith is not a passivity, but a faculty. Faith is power, the material of effect. Faith is a kind of winged intellect. The great workmen of history have been men who believed like giants.
For you, a boy or girl, to be a Christian will be for you to be as nearly as you can like what Jesus was when He was at your age. That is one reason why it is worth so much to us to have a Jesus that began in the cradle and gradually grew up. If we had a Jesus that was already a man when He came, and hadn’t stopped to be a baby and a boy, we should hardly have known what to say to the children about these things; we might have had to say that only grown-up men and women could be Christians. But now we have Jesus all the way along, from eighteen inches up, so that we can say to any one, “You can be a Christian by being as nearly as you can like what Jesus was at your age.”
Genius does not care much for a set of explicit regulations, but that does not mean that genius is lawless.
Hell is both sides of the tomb, and a devil may be respectable and wear good clothes.
Home interprets heaven. Home is heaven for beginners.
Human success is a quotation from overhead.
Ideals we do not make. We discover, not invent, them.
It is all a mistake that we cannot be good and manly without being scrupulously and studiously good. There is too much mechanism about our virtue.
Labor, is the handmaid of religion.
Laws of nature are God’s thoughts thinking themselves out in the orbits and the tides.
Little works, little thoughts, little loves, little prayers for little Christians, and larger and larger as the years grow.
My sin is the black spot which my bad act makes, seen against the disk of the Sun of Righteousness. Hence religion and sin come and go together.
Pity is not enough better than indifference to benefit materially either agent or recipient.
Purpose directs energy, and purpose makes energy.
Purpose is what gives life a meaning.
Purposelessness is the fruitful mother of crime.
Sin spoils the spirit’s delicacy, and unwillingness deadens its susceptibility.
So far from genius discarding law, rather is it the supreme joy of genius to re-enact the eternal and unwritten law in the chamber of its own intellect.
Sympathy is two hearts tugging at one load.
The old echoes are long in dying.
The safest words are always those which bring us most directly to facts.
Virtue is safe only when it is inspired.
We are religious by nature.
Wonder is prophetic.