Hosea Ballou Quotes

Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.

Those who commit injustice bear the greatest burden.

Theories are always very thin and insubstantial, experience only is tangible.

Suspicion is far more to be wrong than right; more often unjust than just. It is no friend to virtue, and always an enemy to happiness.

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.

No one has a greater asset for his business than a man's pride in his work.

Never be so brief as to become obscure.

Error is always more busy than truth.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

There is no such things as 'best' in the world of individuals.

The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

Hatred is self-punishment.

Falsehood is cowardice, the truth courage.

Exaggeration is a blood relation to falsehood and nearly as blamable.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

Religion which requires persecution to sustain, it is of the devil's propagation.

Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character.

Never let your zeal outrun your charity. The former is but human, the latter is divine.

Energy, like the biblical grain of the mustard-seed, will remove mountains.

Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.

Preaching is to much avail, but practice is far more effective. A godly life is the strongest argument you can offer the skeptic.

Tears of joy are like the summer rain drops pierced by sunbeams.

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.