Quotes by Augustus Hare

• Only when the voice of duty is silent, or when it has already spoken, may we allowably think of the consequences of a particular action.
• The virtue of paganism was strength; the virtue of Christianity is obedience.
• Some people carry their hearts in their heads; very many carry their heads in their hearts. The difficulty is to keep them apart, yet both actively working together.
• The intellect of the wise is like glass; it admits the light of heaven and reflects it.
• The power of faith will often shine forth the most when the character is naturally weak.
• Since the generality of persons act from impulse, much more than from principle, men are neither so good nor so bad as we are apt to think them.
• There is no being eloquent for atheism. In that exhausted receiver the mind cannot use its wings, - the clearest proof that it is out of its element.
• Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail, and mankind the vessel.
• To Adam Paradise was home. To the good among his descendants home is paradise.
• What hypocrites we seem to be whenever we talk of ourselves! Our words sound so humble, while our hearts are so proud.
• Nothing is farther than earth from heaven; nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.
• A statesman, we are told, should follow public opinion. Doubtless, as a coachman follows his horses; having firm hold on the reins and guiding them.
• What a person praises is perhaps a surer standard, even than what he condemns, of his own character, information and abilities.
• Nothing good bursts forth all at once. The lightning may dart out of a black cloud; but the day sends his bright heralds before him, to prepare the world for his coming.
• Many are ambitious of saying grand things, that is, of being grandiloquent.
• Love, it has been said, flows downward. The love of parents for their children has always been far more powerful than that of children for their parents; and who among the sons of men ever loved God with a thousandth part of the love which God has manifested to us?
• It is with flowers as with moral qualities; the bright are sometimes poisonous; but, I believe, never the sweet.
• It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life.
• It is a proof of our natural bias to evil, that gain is slower and harder than loss in all things good; but in all things bad getting is quicker and easier than getting rid of.
• Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to know the sense of it.
• Examples would indeed be excellent things were not people so modest that none will set, and so vain that none will follow them.
• As to the pure all things are pure, even so to the impure all things are impure.
• A mother should give her children a superabundance of enthusiasm; that after they have lost all they are sure to lose on mixing with the world, enough may still remain to prompt fated support them through great actions.
• A man prone to suspect evil is mostly looking in his neighbor for what he sees in himself.
• Crimes sometimes shock us too much; vices almost always too little.