Charles Henry Parkhurst Quotes

Purposelessness is the fruitful mother of crime.

Sympathy is two hearts tugging at one load.

Purpose is what gives life meaning.

Home interprets heaven. Home is heaven for beginners.

All true manliness grows around a core of divineness.

All great discoveries are made by men whose feelings run ahead of their thinking.

Virtue is safe only when it is inspired.

Faith is the heroism of the intellect.

The man who lives by himself and for himself is likely to be corrupted by the company he keeps.

Laws of Nature are God's thoughts thinking themselves out in the orbs and the tides.

Faith is a kind of winged intellect. The great workmen of history have been men who believed like giants.

The heart has eyes which the brain knows nothing of.

Faith is among men what gravity is among planets and suns.

Christ took hold of the work of the world's saving in a larger way than it is possible for us to do, and therefore the burden of His undertaking came upon Him in a heavier, wider, and more crushing way than it can come upon us; and therefore, while it overwhelmed Him in sorrow, our smaller mission and lighter task can with entire propriety leave us buoyant and gladsome.

Character is the impulse reined down into steady continuance.

Human success is a quotation from overhead.

There is always the possibility of beauty where there is an unsealed human eye; of music where there is an unstopped human ear; and of inspiration where there is a receptive human spirit.

The old echoes are long in dying.

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.

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.

We are religious by nature.

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 intel-lect.

Genius does not care much for a set of explicit regulations, but that does not mean that genius is lawless.

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 work men of history have been men who believed like giants.

Faith is mind at its best, its bravest, and its fiercest. Faith is thought become poetry, and absorbing into itself the soul's great, passions. Faith is intellect carried up to its transfigurement.

Character is, for the most part, simply habit become fixed.

Science is like society and trade, in resting at bottom upon a basis of faith. There are some things here, too, that we can not prove, otherwise there would be nothing we can prove. Science is busy with the hither-end of things, not the thither-end. It is a mistake to contrast religion and science in this respect, and to think of religion as taking everything for granted, and science as doing only clean work, and having all the loose ends gathered up and tucked in. We never reach the roots of things in science more than in religion.

Hell is both sides of the tomb, and a devil may be respectable and wear good clothes.

Purpose directs energy, and purpose makes energy.

In a life which has meaning in it, past and future sustain each other.

Curiosity is thought on its entering edge.

Science has not solved difficulties, only shifted the points of difficulty.

Purpose, and to be thoroughly wedded to that purpose, is three quarters of salvation.

Any supreme insight is a metaphor.

The safest words are always those which bring us most directly to facts.

Science is busy with the hither-end of things, not the thither-end.

Sin spoils the spirit's delicacy, and unwillingness deadens its susceptibility.

Labor is the handmaid of religion.

Every thought was once a poem.

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.

Ideals we do not make. We discover, not invent, them.

Little works, little thoughts, little loves, little prayers for little Christians, and larger and larger as the years grow.

And let me say only this one word more: that the little things that a little Christian does are not any more than the larger things that an older Christian does.