Top 80 Theodore Parker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Theodore Parker

2. “Remorse is the pain of sin.”

— Theodore Parker

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

— Theodore Parker

4. “Justice is the idea of God, the ideal of man, the rule of conduct writ in the nature of mankind.”

— Theodore Parker

5. “Disappointment is often the salt of life.”

— Theodore Parker

6. “Democracy is direct self-government over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.”

— Theodore Parker

7. “Who escapes a duty, avoids a gain.”

— Theodore Parker

8. “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.”

— Theodore Parker

9. “Want and wealth equally harden the human heart, as frost and fire are both alien to the human flesh. Famine and gluttony alike drive away nature from the heart of man.”

— Theodore Parker

10. “Never violate the sacredness of your individual self-respect.”

— Theodore Parker

11. “I am conscious of eternal life.”

— Theodore Parker

12. “Great success is a great temptation.”

— Theodore Parker

13. “The miser, poor fool, not only starves his body, but also his own soul.”

— Theodore Parker

14. “All men need something to poetize and idealize their life a little-something which they value for more than its use, and which is a symbol of their emancipation from the mere materialism and drudgery of daily life.”

— Theodore Parker

15. “The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most.”

— Theodore Parker

16. “The joy of heaven will begin as soon as we attain the character of heaven, and do its duties.”

— Theodore Parker

17. “That which is called liberality is frequently nothing more than the vanity of giving.”

— Theodore Parker

18. “A happy wedlock is a long falling in love.”

— Theodore Parker

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

— Theodore Parker

20. “Every rose is an autograph from the hand of the Almighty God on this world about us. He has inscribed His thoughts in these marvelous hieroglyphics which sense and science have been these many thousand years seeking to understand.”

— Theodore Parker

21. “Pride is both a virtue and a vice.”

— Theodore Parker

22. “The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. A great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.”

— Theodore Parker

23. “Silence is a figure of speech, unanswerable, short, cold, but terribly severe.”

— Theodore Parker

24. “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.”

— Theodore Parker

25. “There is no intercessor, angel, mediator, between man and God; for man can speak and God hear, each for himself. He requires no advocates to plead for men.”

— Theodore Parker

26. “The union of men in large masses is indispensable to the development and rapid growth of the higher faculties of men. Cities have always been the fireplaces of civilization whence light and heat radiated out into the dark cold world.”

— Theodore Parker

27. “The miser, starving his brother’s body, starves also his own soul, and at death shall creep out of his great estate of injustice, poor and naked and miserable.”

— Theodore Parker

28. “Magnificent promises are always to be suspected.”

— Theodore Parker

29. “I believe in the admission of women to the full rights of citizenship and share in government, on the express grounds that few women keep house so badly or with such wastefulness as chancellors of the exchequer keep the state.”

— Theodore Parker

30. “The earnestness of life is the only passport to satisfaction of life.”

— Theodore Parker

31. “Self-denial is indispensable to a strong character, and the highest kind comes from a religious stock.”

— Theodore Parker

32. “Mankind never loses any good thing, physical, intellectual, or moral, till it finds a better, and then the loss is a gain. No steps backward is the rule of human history. What is gained by one man is invested in all men, and is a permanent investment for all time.”

— Theodore Parker

33. “Man never falls so low that he can see nothing higher than himself.”

— Theodore Parker

34. “Science is the natural ally of religion.”

— Theodore Parker

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

— Theodore Parker

36. “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.”

— Theodore Parker

37. “Gratitude is a nice touch of beauty added last of all to the countenance. Giving a classic beauty, an angelic loveliness, to the character.”

— Theodore Parker

38. “Nature is God’s Old Testament.”

— Theodore Parker

39. “Outward judgment often fails, inward judgment never.”

— Theodore Parker

40. “Genius is the father of a heavenly line, but the mortal mother, that is industry.”

— Theodore Parker

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

— Theodore Parker

42. “Nature is man’s religious book, with lessons for every day.”

— Theodore Parker

43. “Temperance is corporeal piety; it is the preservation of divine order in the body.”

— Theodore Parker

44. “The heresy of one age is the orthodox belief and “only infallible rule” of the nest.”

— Theodore Parker

45. “The coat of the buffalo never pinches under the arm, never puckers at the shoulders; it is always the same, yet never old fashioned nor out of date.”

— Theodore Parker

46. “The diamond which shines in the Saviour’s crown shall burn in unquenched beauty at last on the forehead of every human soul.”

— Theodore Parker

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

— Theodore Parker

48. “You may not, cannot, appropriate beauty. It is the wealth of the eye, and a cat may gaze upon a king.”

— Theodore Parker

49. “Intellect is stronger than cannon.”

— Theodore Parker

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

— Theodore Parker