Hugh Reginald Haweis Quotes

The time is probably not far distant when music will stand revealed perchance as the mightiest of the arts, and certainly as the one art peculiarly representative of our modern world, with its intense life, complex civilization, and feverish self-consciousness.

All good government must begin at home. It is useless to make good laws for bad people; what is wanted is this, to subdue the tyranny of the human heart.

The cause of freedom, in music as elsewhere, is now very nearly triumphant; but at a time when its adversaries were many and powerful, we can hardly imagine the sacred bridge of liberty kept by a more stalwart trio than Schubert the Armorer, Chopin the Refiner, and Liszt the Thunderer.

It reveals us to ourselves, it represents those modulations and temperamental changes which escape all verbal analysis, it utters what must else remain forever unuttered and unutterable; it feeds that deep, ineradicable instinct within us of which all art is only the reverberated echo, that craving to express, through the medium of the senses, the spiritual and eternal realities which underlie them.

Emotion is the atmosphere in which thought is steeped, that which lends to thought its tone or temperature, that to which thought is often indebted for half its power.

All good government must begin at home.

Give God the margin of eternity to justify himself.

Oh, the solitariness of sin! There is nothing like it, except, perhaps, the solitariness of death. In that isolation none can reach you, none can feed you.

To be selfish is to sacrifice the nobler for the meaner ends, and to be sordidly content.

It is not the business of religion in these days to isolate herself from the world like John the Baptist. She must go down into the world like Jesus Christ.

The religious instinct will never be replaced by law or even philanthropy.

Man may doubt here and there, but mankind does not doubt.

Personality is that which is most intimate to me—that by which I must act out my life. It is that by which I belong to man, that by which I amable to reach after God; and He has given to me this pearl of great price. It is an immortal treasure; it is mine, it is His, and no man shall pluck it out of His hand.

Think not you are charitable if the love of Jesus and His brethren be not purely the motive of your gifts. Alas! you might not give your superfluities, but "bestow all your goods to feed the poor;" you might even "give your body to be burned" for them, and yet be utterly destitute of charity, if self-seeking, self-pleasing or self-ends guide you; and guide you they must, until the love of God be by the Holy Ghost shed abroad in your heart.

Love is a many-sided sacrifice; it means thoughtfulness for others; it means putting their good before self-gratification. Love is impulse, no doubt, but true love is impulse wisely directed.

No hell will frighten men away from sin; no dread of prospective misery; only goodness can cast hell out of any man, and set up the kingdom of heaven within.

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Although music appeals simply to the emotions, and represents no definite images in itself, we are justified in using any language which may serve to convey to others our musical expressions. Words will often pave the way for the more subtle operations of music, and unlock the treasures which sound alone can rifle, and hence the eternal popularity of song.

Give God the margin of eternity to justify Himself in, and the more we live and know of our own souls and of spiritual experience generally, the more we shall be convinced that we have to do with one who is good and just.

Feeling comes before reflection.

Precious beyond price are good resolutions. Valuable beyond price are good feelings.

No soul is bad enough for a fixed "hell," or good enough for a fixed "heaven," however useful the words may be as pointing to opposite states.

Morality will be very difficult for the man who does not pray.

After the sleep of death we are to gather up our forces again with the incalculable results of this life, a crown of shame or glory upon our heads, and begin again on a new level of progress.