Charles Kingsley famous quotes

A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend, one human soul whom we can trust utterly, who knows the best and worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all our faults.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Love #Friendship #Trust

All we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Happiness #Running #Reality

There are two freedoms - the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Freedom #Men #Two

I do not want merely to possess a faith, I want a faith that possesses me.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Faith #Want #Want Me

Nothing is so infectious as example.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Example

Better is old wine than new, and old friends like-wise.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Wise #Wine #Old Friends

Pain is no evil, unless it conquers us.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Pain #Reality #Evil

It is only the great hearted who can be true friends. The mean and cowardly, Can never know what true friendship means.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Friendship #True Friend #Mean

Cheerfulness is full of significance: it suggests good health, a clear conscience, and a soul at peace with all human nature.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Soul #Human Nature #Good Health

It is not darkness you are going to, for God is Light. It is not lonely, for Christ is with you. It is not unknown country, for Christ is there.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Country #Lonely #Light

Every duty which is bidden to wait returns with seven fresh duties at its back.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Procrastination #Waiting #Return

Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Book #Reading #Men

The men whom I have seen succeed best in life always have been cheerful and hopeful men; who went about their business with a smile on their faces; and took the changes and chances of this mortal life like men; facing rough and smooth alike as it came.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Life #Hope #Men

Tis the hard grey weather Breeds hard English men.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Men #Weather #Grey

All but God is changing day by day.
-- Charles Kingsley

Make it a rule and pray to God to help you keep it . . . never, if possible, to lie down at night without being able to say "I have made one human being at least a little wiser, a little happier, or a little better this day."
-- Charles Kingsley

#Inspirational Love #Lying #Night

If you want to be miserable, think about yourself, about what you want, what you like, what respect people ought to pay you and what people think of you.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Thinking #People #Pay

The most wonderful and the strongest things in the world, you know, are just the things which no one can see.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Life #World #Wonderful

Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Self #Excellence #Virtue

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

#Change #Nature #Travel

Have thy tools ready. God will find thee work.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Work #Christian Inspirational #Tools

Do noble things, not dream them all day long.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Dream #Long #Noble

Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Birthday #Past #Long

Feelings are like chemicals, the more you analyze them the worse they smell.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Smell #Feelings #Chemicals

If you wish to be miserable, think about yourself, about what you want, what you like, what respect people ought to pay you, what people think of you; and then to you nothing will be pure. You will spoil everything you touch; you will make sin and misery for yourself out of everything God sends you; you will be as wretched as you choose.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Respect #Thinking #People

Do today's duty, fight today's temptation; do not weaken and distract yourself by looking forward to things you cannot see, and could not understand if you saw them.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Fighting #Temptation #Today

And how high is Christ's cross? As high as the highest heaven, and the throne of God, and the bosom of the Father that bosom out of which forever proceed all created things. Ay, as high as the highest heaven! for if you will receive it when Christ hung upon the cross, heaven came down on earth, and earth ascended into heaven.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Father #Forever #Heaven

And what is the joy of Christ? The joy and delight which springs forever in His great heart, from feeling that He is forever doing good; from loving all, and living for all; from knowing that if not all, yet millions on millions are grateful to Him, and will be forever.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Spring #Grateful #Heart

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

#Church #Holiness #Virtue

I believe not only in "special providences," but in the whole universe as one infinite complexity of "special providences.
-- Charles Kingsley

#God #Believe #Special

Whatever may be the mysteries of life and death, there is one mystery which the cross of Christ reveals to us, and that is the infinite and absolute goodness of God. Let all the rest remain a mystery so long as the mystery of the cross of Christ gives us faith for all the rest.
-- Charles Kingsley

#God #Long #Life And Death

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

#Jesus #Believe #Heart

Let us ask ourselves seriously and honestly, " What do I believe after all? What manner of man am I after all? What sort of show would I make after all, if the people around me knew my heart and all my secret thoughts?" What sort of show then do I already make in the sight of Almighty God, who sees every man exactly as he is?
-- Charles Kingsley

#Believe #Heart #Men

Are gods more ruthless than mortals? Have they no mercy for youth? no love for the souls who have loved them?
-- Charles Kingsley

#Soul #Youth #Mercy

Toil is the true knight's pastime.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Knights #Toil #Pastime

You are literally filled with the fruit of your own devices, with rats and mice and such small deer, paramecia, and entomostraceæ, and kicking things with horrid names, which you see in microscopes at the Polytechnic, and rush home and call for brandy-without the water-stone, and gravel, and dyspepsia, and fragments of your own muscular tissue tinged with your own bile.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Home #Science #Names

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

#Men #Holy #Goodness

Our wanton accidents take root, and grow To vaunt themselves God's laws.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Roots #Law #Vaunt

Grandeur . . . consists in form, and not in size: and to the eye of the philosopher, the curve drawn on a paper two inches long, is just as magnificent, just as symbolic of divine mysteries and melodies, as when embodied in the span of some cathedral roof.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Eye #Two #Curves

Three fishers went sailing away to the west, Away to the west as the sun went down; Each thought on the woman who loved him the best, And the children stood watching them out of the town.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Children #Sailing #Towns

Still the race of hero spirits pass the lamp from hand to hand.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Hero #Race #Hands

Ay, marriage is the life-long miracle, The self-begetting wonder, daily fresh.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Self #Long #Miracle

Possession means to sit astride the world Instead of having it astride of you.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Mean #World #Possession

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

#Hymns #Long #Singing

Never trample on any soul though it may be lying in the veriest mire; for that last spark of self-respect is its only hope, its only chance; the last seed of a new and better life: the voice of God that whispers to it: "You are not what you ought to be, and you are not what you can be. You are still God's child, still an immortal soul. You may rise yet. and fight a good fight yet, and be a man once more, after the likeness of God who made you, and Christ who died for you!
-- Charles Kingsley

#Children #Lying #Fighting

The world is God's world, after all.
-- Charles Kingsley

#World

Depend upon it, a man never experiences such pleasure or grief after fourteen years as he does before, unless in some cases, in his first lovemaking, when the sensation is new to him
-- Charles Kingsley

#Grief #First Love #Men

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

#Loyalty #Sacrifice #Men

Stick to the old truths and the old paths, and learn their di- vineness by sick-beds and in every-day work, and do not darken your mind with intellectual puzzles, which may breed disbelief, but can never breed vital religion or practical usefulness.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Truth #Sick #Intellectual

How long would it take a school-inspector of average activity to tumble head over heels from London toYork?
-- Charles Kingsley

#School #Average #Long

So give me the political economist, the sanitary reformer, the engineer; and take your saints and virgins, relics and miracles. The spinning-jenny and the railroad, Cunard's liners and the electric telegraph, are to me, if not to you, signs that we are, on some points at least, in harmony with the universe; that there is a mighty spirit working among us, who cannot be your anarchic and destroying Devil, and therefore may be the Ordering and Creating God.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Creating #Giving #Miracle

I can conceive few human states more enviable than that of the man to whom, panting in the foul laboratory, or watching for his life under the tropic forest, Isis shall for a moment lift her sacred veil, and show him, once and for ever, the thing he dreamed not of; some law, or even mere hint of a law, explaining one fact; but explaining with it a thousand more, connecting them all with each other and with the mighty whole, till order and meaning shoots through some old Chaos of scattered observations.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Science #Men #Isis

If "ifs" and "ands" were pots and pans, there'd be no work for tinkers' hands
-- Charles Kingsley

#Humorous #Hands #Ifs And

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

#Men #Giving #Feelings

Now, to tell my story--if not as it ought to be told, at least as I can tell it,--I must go back sixteen years, to the days when Whitbury boasted of forty coaches per diem, instead of one railway, and set forth how in its southern suburb, there stood two pleasant house side by side, with their gardens sloping down to the Whit, and parted from each other only by the high brick fruit-wall, through which there used to be a door of communication; for the two occupiers were fast friends.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Wall #Book #Communication

All who have travelled through the delicious scenery of North Devon must needs know the little white town of Bideford, which slopes upwards from its broad tide-river paved with yellow sands, and many-arched old bridge, where salmon wait for Autumn floods, toward the pleasant upland on the west.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Book #Autumn #Bridges

Because I believe in a God of absolute and unbounded love, therefore I believe in a loving anger of His which will and must devour and destroy all which is decayed, monstrous, abortive in His universe till all enemies shall be put under His feet, and God shall be all in all.
-- Charles Kingsley

#God #Believe #Feet

Love can make us fiends as well as angels.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Love #Angel #Wells

Music is a sacred, a divine, a God-like thing, and was given to man by Christ to lift our hearts up to God, and make us feel something of the glory and beauty of God, and of all which God has made.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Music #Heart #Men

If you do anything above party, the true hearted ones of all parties sympathize with you.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Party #Politics #Hearted

Have charity; have patience; have mercy. Never bring a human being, however silly, ignorant, or weak--above all, any little child--to shame and confusion of face. Never by petulance, by suspicion, by ridicule, even by selfish and silly haste--never, above all, by indulging in the devilish pleasure of a sneer--crush what is finest and rouse up what is coarsest in the heart of any fellow-creature.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Crush #Children #Selfish

Pray over every truth; for though the renewed heart is not "desperately wicked," it is quite deceitful enough to become so, if God be forgotten a moment.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Truth #Heart #Wicked

Do you feel that you have lost your way in life? Then God Himself will show you your way. Are you utterly helpless, worn out, body and soul? Then God's eternal love is ready and willing to help you up, and revive you. Are you wearied with doubts and terrors? Then God's eternal light is ready to show you your way; God's eternal peace ready to give you peace. Do you feel yourself full of sins and faults? Then take heart; for God's unchangeable will is, to take away those sins, and purge you from those faults.
-- Charles Kingsley

#God #Heart #Love Is

How many serious family quarrels, marriages out of spite, and alterations of wills, might have been prevented by a gentle dose of blue pill!-What awful instances of chronic dyspepsia in the characters of Hamlet and Othello! Banish dyspepsia and spirituous liquors from society, and you have no crime, or at least so little that you would not consider it worth mentioning.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Character #Blue #Awful

Look at the bow in the cloud, in the very rain itself. That is a sign that the sun, though you cannot see it, is shining still -- that up above beyond the cloud is still sunlight and warmth and cloudless blue sky.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Military #War #Rain

Life is too short for mean anxieties.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Life Is Too Short #Mean #Worry

Oh England is a pleasant place for them that's rich and high, But England is a cruel place for such poor folks as I
-- Charles Kingsley

#England #Wealth #Rich

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

#Christian #Book #Years

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

#Religious #Heart #Character

A fine lady; by which term I wish to express the result of that perfect education in taste and manner, down to every gesture, which heaven forbid that I, professing to be a poet, should undervalue. It is beautiful, and therefore I welcome it in the name of the author of all beauty. I value it so highly that I would fain see it extend not merely from Belgravia to the tradesman's villa, but thence, as I believe it one day will, to the laborer's hovel and the needlewoman's garret.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Beautiful #Believe #Names

Do what thou dost as if the earth were heaven, and thy last day the day of judgment.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Heaven #Earth #Lasts

Study nature as the countenance of God.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Study #Countenance

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

#Simple #Plagiarism #Thinker

It has been said that true religion will make a man a more thorough gentleman than all the courts in Europe. And it is true that you may see simple laboring men as thorough gentlemen as any duke, simply because they have learned to fear God; and, fearing him, to restrain themselves, which is the very root and essence of all good breeding.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Simple #Men #Europe

What I want is, not to possess religion, but to have a religion that shall possess me.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Want

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

#Expression #Appreciate #Style

For to be discontented with the divine discontent, and to be ashamed with the noble shame, is the very germ and first upgrowth of all virtue.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Noble #Firsts #Germs

Nothing like one honest look, one honest thought of Christ upon His cross. That tells us how much He has been through, how much He endured, how much He conquered, how much God loved us, who spared not His only begotten Son, but freely gave Him for us. Dare we doubt such a God? Dare we murmur against such a God?
-- Charles Kingsley

#Son #Doubt #Looks

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

#Art #Fighting #Giving

Duty--the command of heaven, the eldest voice of God.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Voice #Heaven #Duty

I am not aware that payment, or even favors, however gracious, bind any man's soul and conscience in questions of highest morality and highest importance.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Men #Soul #Favors

Wherever is love and loyalty, great purposes and lofty souls, even though in a hovel or a mine, there is fairyland.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Loyalty #Soul #Purpose

After all, there is such a thing as looking like a gentleman. There are men whose class no dirt or rags can hide, any more than they could Ulysses. I have seen such men in plenty among workmen, too; but, on the whole, the gentleman--by whom I do not mean just now the rich--have the superiority in that point. But not, please God, forever. Give us the same air, water, exercise, education, good society, and you will see whether this "haggardness," this "coarseness" (etc., for the list is too long to specify), be an accident, or a property, of the man of the people.
-- Charles Kingsley

#Mean #Exercise #Men

And now I'm old and going--I'm sure I can't tell where; One comfort is, this world's so hard, I can't be worse off there
-- Charles Kingsley

#Age #Comfort #World