Quotes by Hosea Ballou

• Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.
• Error is always more busy than truth.
• Energy, like the biblical grain of the mustard-seed, will remove mountains.
• Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character.
• Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.
• Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.
• Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.
• There is no such things as "best" in the world of individuals.
• Exaggeration is a blood relation to falsehood and nearly as blamable.
• Those who commit injustice bear the greatest burden.
• Theories are always very thin and insubstantial, experience only is tangible.
• 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.
• Tears of joy are like the summer rain drops pierced by sunbeams.
• 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.
• Falsehood is cowardice, the truth courage.
• No one has a greater asset for his business than a man's pride in his work.
• Never let your zeal outrun your charity. The former is but human, the latter is divine.
• Never be so brief as to become obscure.
• It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.
• Hatred is self-punishment.
• Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.
• Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.
• Preaching is to much avail, but practice is far more effective. A godly life is the strongest argument you can offer the skeptic.