 Ethical religion can be real only to those who are engaged in ceaseless efforts at moral improvement. By moving upward we acquire faith in an upward movement, without limit. |
| Perhaps a hundred people assembled one evening, May 15, 1876, at the time when the country was celebrating the hundredth anniversary of its political independence. |
| Love of country is like love of woman - he loves her best who seeks to bestow on her the highest good. |
| No religion can long continue to maintain its purity when the church becomes the subservient vassal of the state. |
| The Ethical Society, therefore, is like a Church in maintaining, and emphasizing the importance of maintaining the custom of public assemblies on Sunday. |
| Admitting the force of these contentions, nevertheless, the custom of meeting together in public assembly for the consideration of the most serious, the most exalted topics of human interest is too vitally precious to be lost. |
| You do not build your own houses, nor make your own garments, nor bake your own bread, simply because you know that if you were to attempt all these things they would all be more or less ill done. |
| The freedom of thought is a sacred right of every individual man, and diversity will continue to increase with the progress, refinement, and differentiation of the human intellect. |
| The family is the school of duties - founded on love. Topics: Family |
| For more than three thousand years men have quarreled concerning the formulas of their faith. |
| The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action. |
| The ethical manifold, conceived of as unified, furnishes, or rather is, the ideal of the whole. |
| Every dogma, every philosophic or theological creed, was at its inception a statement in terms of the intellect of a certain inner experience. |
| The hero is one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by. |
| In a country of such recent civilization as ours, whose almost limitless treasures of material wealth invite the risks of capital and the industry of labor, it is but natural that material interests should absorb the attention of the people to a degree elsewhere unknown. |
| An anxious unrest, a fierce craving desire for gain has taken possession of the commercial world, and in instances no longer rare the most precious and permanent goods of human life have been madly sacrificed in the interests of momentary enrichment. |
| The platform of an Ethical Society is itself the altar; the address must be the fire that burns thereon. |
| Where the roots of private virtue are diseased, the fruit of public probity cannot but be corrupt. |
| FOR a long time the conviction has been dimly felt in the community that, without prejudice to existing institutions, the legal day of weekly rest might be employed to advantage for purposes affecting the general good. |
| We measure our enjoyments by the sum expended. |
