Top 100 Charles Kingsley Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Those that wish to be clean, clean they will be; and those that wish to be foul, foul they will be. Remember.”

— Charles Kingsley

52. “It’s all in the day’s work, as the huntsman said when the lion ate him.”

— Charles Kingsley

53. “Tis the hard grey weather Breeds hard English men.”

— Charles Kingsley

54. “Gradually the sunken land begins to rise again, and falls perhaps again, and rises again after that, more and more gently each time, till as it were the panting earth, worn out with the fierce passions of her fiery youth, has sobbed herself to sleep once more, and this new world of man is made.”

— Charles Kingsley

55. “The world goes up and the world goes down, the sunshine follows the rain; and yesterday’s sneer and yesterday’s frown can never come over again.”

— Charles Kingsley

56. “Study nature as the countenance of God.”

— Charles Kingsley

57. “There will be no true freedom without virtue, no true science without religion, no true industry without the fear of God and love to your fellow citizens.”

— Charles Kingsley

58. “Music has been called the speech of the angels; I will go farther and call it the speech of God Himself.”

— Charles Kingsley

59. “Every winter, When the great sun has turned his face away, The earth goes down into a vale of grief, And fasts, and weeps, and shrouds herself in sables, Leaving her wedding-garlands to decay- Then leaps in spring to his returning kisses.”

— Charles Kingsley

60. “Toil is the true knight’s pastime.”

— Charles Kingsley

61. “Ay, marriage is the life-long miracle, The self-begetting wonder, daily fresh.”

— Charles Kingsley

62. “If you wish to be like a little child, study what a little child could understand – nature; and do what a little child could do – love.”

— Charles Kingsley

63. “In proportion as man gets back the spirit of manliness, which is self-sacrifice, affection, loyalty loan idea beyond himself, a God above himself, so far will he rise above circumstances, and wield them at his will.”

— Charles Kingsley

64. “You must not talk about ‘ain’t and can’t’ when you speak of this great wonderful world round you, of which the wisest man knows only the very smallest corner, and is, as the great Sir Isaac Newton said, only a child picking up pebbles on the shore of a boundless ocean.”

— Charles Kingsley

65. “A garden, sir, wherein all rainbows and flowers were heaped together.”

— Charles Kingsley

66. “Therefore, let us be patient, patient; and let God our Father teach His own lesson, His own way. Let us try to learn it well and quickly; but do not let us fancy that He will ring the school-bell, and send us to play before our lesson is learnt.”

— Charles Kingsley

67. “I go at what I have to do as if there were nothing else in the world for me to do.”

— Charles Kingsley

68. “No earnest thinker is a plagiarist pure and simple. He will never borrow from others that which he has not already, more or less, thought out for himself.”

— Charles Kingsley

69. “If I am ever obscure in my expressions, do not fancy that therefore I am deep. If I were really deep, all the world would understand, though they might not appreciate. The perfectly popular style is the perfectly scientific one. To me an obscurity is a reason for suspecting a fallacy.”

— Charles Kingsley

70. “Do what thou dost as if the earth were heaven, and thy last day the day of judgment.”

— Charles Kingsley

71. “He was not only, I soon discovered, a water drinker, but a strict vegetarian, to which, perhaps, he owed a great deal of the almost preternatural clearness, volubility, and sensitiveness of mind.”

— Charles Kingsley

72. “Nothing is so infectious as example.”

— Charles Kingsley

73. “Never, if possible, lie down at night without being able to say: I have made one human being at least a little wiser, or a little happier, or at least a little better this day.”

— Charles Kingsley

74. “Are gods more ruthless than mortals? Have they no mercy for youth? no love for the souls who have loved them?”

— Charles Kingsley

75. “Nothing that man ever invents will absolve him from the universal necessity of being good as God is good, righteous as God is righteous, and holy as God is holy.”

— Charles Kingsley

76. “We have used the Bible as if it were a mere special constable’s handbook, an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they are overloaded.”

— Charles Kingsley

77. “Do you think that a man is renewed by God’s Spirit, when except for a few religious phrases, and a little more outside respectability, he is just the old man, the same character at heart he ever was?”

— Charles Kingsley

78. “In the four hundred and thirteenth year of the Christian era, some three hundred miles above Alexandria, the young monk Philammon was sitting on the edge of a low range of inland cliffs, crested with drifting sand.”

— Charles Kingsley

79. “Possession means to sit astride the world Instead of having it astride of you.”

— Charles Kingsley

80. “Do not fancy, as too many do, that thou canst praise God by singing hymns to Him in church once a week, and disobeying Him all the week long. He asks of thee works as well as words; and more, he asks of thee works first and words after.”

— Charles Kingsley

81. “Truth, for its own sake, had never been a virtue with the Roman clergy.”

— Charles Kingsley

82. “We shall be made truly wise if we be made content; content, too, not only with what we can understand, but content with what we do not understand-the habit of mind which theologians call, and rightly, faith in God.”

— Charles Kingsley

83. “All but God is changing day by day.”

— Charles Kingsley

84. “The righteousness which is by faith in Christ is a loving heart and a loving life, which every man will long to lead who believes really in Jesus Christ.”

— Charles Kingsley

85. “Our wanton accidents take root, and grow To vaunt themselves God’s laws.”

— Charles Kingsley

86. “I do not see why we should not be as just to an ant as to a human being.”

— Charles Kingsley

87. “You are not very good if you are not better than your best friends imagine you to be.”

— Charles Kingsley

88. “The health of a church depends not merely on the creed which it professes, not even on the wisdom and holiness of a few great ecclesiastics, but on the faith and virtue of its individual members.”

— Charles Kingsley

89. “What I want is, not to possess religion, but to have a religion that shall possess me.”

— Charles Kingsley

90. “How long would it take a school-inspector of average activity to tumble head over heels from London toYork?”

— Charles Kingsley

91. “Nature’s deepest laws, her own true laws, are her invisible ones.”

— Charles Kingsley

92. “I hope that my children, at least, if not I myself, will see the day when ignorance of the primary laws and facts of science will be looked upon as a defect only second to ignorance of the primary laws of religion and morality.”

— Charles Kingsley

93. “We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things – the teacher of all truth.”

— Charles Kingsley

94. “This is the feeling that gives a man true courage-the feeling that he has a work to do at all costs; the sense of duty.”

— Charles Kingsley

95. “Greatness? I have tasted that cup within the last twelve months; do I not know that it is sweet in the mouth, but bitter in the belly?”

— Charles Kingsley

96. “The world is God’s world, after all.”

— Charles Kingsley

97. “If thou art fighting against thy sins, so is God. On thy side is God who made all, and Christ who died for all and the Spirit who alone gives wisdom, purity, and nobleness.”

— Charles Kingsley

98. “All the butterflies and cockyolybirds would fly past me.”

— Charles Kingsley

99. “Duty – the command of heaven, the eldest voice of God.”

— Charles Kingsley

100. “If you do anything above party, the true hearted ones of all parties sympathize with you.”

— Charles Kingsley