Top 80 Theodore Parker Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Humanity is the Son of God.”

— Theodore Parker

52. “No virtue fades out of mankind. Not over-hopeful by inborn temperament, cautious by long experience, I yet never despair of human virtue.”

— Theodore Parker

53. “I ask no risen dust to teach me immortality; I am conscious of eternal life.”

— Theodore Parker

54. “Did the mass of men know the actual selfishness and injustice of their rulers, not a government would stand a year. – The world would foment with revolution.”

— Theodore Parker

55. “What sad faces one always sees in the asylums for orphans! It is more fatal to neglect the heart than the head.”

— Theodore Parker

56. “The use of great men is to serve the little men, to take care of the human race, and act as practical interpreters of justice and truth.”

— Theodore Parker

57. “The great basis of the Christian faith is compassion; do not dismiss that from your hearts, neither will your Maker.”

— Theodore Parker

58. “No man is so great as mankind.”

— Theodore Parker

59. “The whole sum and substance of human history may be reduced to this maxim: that when man departs from the divine means of reaching the divine end, he suffers harm and loss.”

— Theodore Parker

60. “Love of truth will bless the lover all his days; yet when he brings her home, his fair-faced bride, she comes empty-handed to his door, herself her only dower.”

— Theodore Parker

61. “Religion without joy-it is no religion.”

— Theodore Parker

62. “He prays best who, not asking God to do man’s work, prays penitence, prays resolutions, and then prays deeds – thus supplicating with heart and head and hands.”

— Theodore Parker

63. “Wealth and want equally harden the human heart.”

— Theodore Parker

64. “What a joy is there in a good book, writ by some great master of thought, who breaks into beauty as in summer the meadow into grass and dandelions and violets, with geraniums and manifold sweetness.”

— Theodore Parker

65. “Man is the highest product of his own history. The discoverer finds nothing so grand or tall as himself, nothing so valuable to him. The greatest star is at the small end, of the telescope, – the star that is looking, not looked after nor looked at.”

— Theodore Parker

66. “Man is the jewel of God, who has created this material world to keep his treasure in.”

— Theodore Parker

67. “The most useful is the greatest.”

— Theodore Parker

68. “And war-the worst form of evil!”

— Theodore Parker

69. “As society advances the standard of poverty rises.”

— Theodore Parker

70. “There never was a great truth but it was reverenced; never a great institution, nor a great man, that did not, sooner or later, receive the reverence of mankind.”

— Theodore Parker

71. “The duty of labor is written on a man’s body: in the stout muscle of the arm,, and the delicate machinery of the hand.”

— Theodore Parker

72. “All men desire to be immortal.”

— Theodore Parker

73. “Wit has its place in debate; in controversy it is a legitimate weapon, offensive and defensive.”

— Theodore Parker

74. “Yet, if he would, man cannot live all to this world. If not religious, he will be superstitious. IF he worship not the true God, he will have his idols.”

— Theodore Parker

75. “It seems strange that a butterfly’s wing should be woven up so thin and gauzy in the monstrous loom of nature, and be so delicately tipped with fire from such a gross hand, and rainbowed all over in such a storm of thunderous elements. The marvel is that such great forces do such nice work.”

— Theodore Parker

76. “Applying good sense to religion and religion to life. This is the field in which I design to labor.”

— Theodore Parker

77. “Politics is the science of urgencies.”

— Theodore Parker

78. “It is vain to trust in wrong; as much of evil, so much of loss, is the formula of human history.”

— Theodore Parker

79. “All the spaces between my mind and the mind of God are full of truths waiting to be crystallized into laws for the government of the masses.”

— Theodore Parker

80. “In all the world there is nothing so remarkable as a great man, nothing so rare, nothing which so well repays study.”

— Theodore Parker

81. “What succeeds we keep, and it becomes the habit of mankind.”

— Theodore Parker

82. “Be not familiar with the idea of wrong, for sin in fancy mothers many an ugly fact.”

— Theodore Parker

83. “There is no college for the conscience.”

— Theodore Parker

84. “Marriages are best made of dissimilar material.”

— Theodore Parker

85. “Greatness is its own torment.”

— Theodore Parker

86. “I look through the grave into heaven.”

— Theodore Parker

87. “For a thousand years no king in Christendom has shown such greatness or given so high a type of manly virtue.”

— Theodore Parker

88. “The lottery of honest labor, drawn by time, is the only one whose prizes are worth taking up and carrying home.”

— Theodore Parker