Joseph Cook Quotes

There is a certain physiognomy in manners.

So many people glorify and romanticize 'busy.' I do not. I value purpose. I believe in resting in reason and moving in passion. If you’re always busy/moving, you will miss important details. I like the mountain. Still, but when it moves, lands shift and earth quakes.

Conscience is our magnetic compass; reason our chart.

What is the average type of a counterfeit church? A hammock, attached on one side to the cross, and, on the other, held and swung to and fro by the forefinger of Mammon; its freight of nominal Christians elegantly moaning meanwhile over the evils of the times, and not at ease unless fanned by eloquence and music, and sprinkled by social adulations into perfumed, unheroic slumber.

It is not always the highest talent that thrives best. Mediocrity, with tact, will outweigh talent oftentimes.

Our secret thoughts are rarely heard except in secret. No man knows what conscience is until he understands what solitude can teach him concerning it.

The Unknown is an ocean. What is conscience? The compass of the Unknown.

We must judge religious movements, not by the men who make them, but by the men they make.

Only the home can found a state.

Do you know a book that you are willing to put under your head for a pillow when you lie dying? Very well; that is the book you want to study while you are living. There is but one such book in the world.

Of all my wife's relations I like myself the best.

We shall never be at peace with ourselves until we yield with glad supremacy to our higher faculties.

It is the will to be grateful which constitutes gratitude.

The sense of duty pursues us ever.

Sin is free, or you cannot make sin out of it.

The secret of solitude is that there is no solitude.

We only begin to realize the value of our possessions when we commence to do good to others with them. No earthly investment pays so large an interest as charity.

Narrowness is the mother of unbelief. Obtain a broad outlook if you would agree with God in your philosophy and be able to transmit God's own thought into your life.

A monarchy is like a man-of-war--bad shots between wind and water hurt it exceedingly; there is danger of capsizing. But democracy is a raft. You cannot easily overturn it. It is a wet place, but it is a pretty safe one.

Pillow my head on no guesses when I die.

Woman's rights should come by evolution, and not by revolution. I want a little woman's right tried first, and then, if the experience is bad, we can go back on our track; if good, forward.

God is making commerce His missionary.

If society will adopt the rule of nature, and justify no marriage without a supreme affection, the evils of marriage without love will be sufficiently cured. Those who marry without the consent of Nature may securely expect trouble.

Until we have a natural, that is, a conscientious world, it cannot be known by experience what natural law will do for the gratification of a supreme affection; but, if you will give me that world, there will be in it very few not called to marriage, provided society allows proper opportunities for acquaintance between marriageable persons.

A single profane expression betrays a man's low breeding.

Safe popular freedom consists of four things, the diffusion of liberty, of intelligence, of property, and of conscientiousness, and cannot be compounded of any three out of the four.

A thinker is a person.