34 Hosea Ballou Quotes

If gratitude is due from children to their earthly parent, how much more is the gratitude of the great family of men due to our father in Heaven?

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

Honest and courageous people have very little to say about either their courage or their honesty.

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

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

Falsehood is cowardice, the truth courage.

Error is always more busy than truth.

There is no such thing as "best" in the world of individuals.

Hatred is self-punishment.

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

Not the least misfortune in a prominent falsehood is the fact that tradition is apt to repeat it for truth.

They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.

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.

There is no possible excuse for a guarded lie. Enthusiastic and impulsive people will sometimes falsify thoughtlessly, but equivocation is malice pretense.

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

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.

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

As unkindness has no remedy at law, let its avoidance be with you a point of honor.

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

Never be so brief as to become obscure.

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

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

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

There is one inevitable criterion of judgment touching religious faith. Can you reduce it to practice? If not, have none of it.

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

Moderation is the key to lasting enjoyment.

Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.

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

Those who commit injustice bear the greatest burden.

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

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.

It is in sickness that we most feel the need of that sympathy which shows how much we are dependent upon one another for our comfort, and even necessities. Thus disease, opening our eyes to the realities of life, is an indirect blessing.