Henry Drummond Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by Henry Drummond with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
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“To live is to correspond, and to correspond is to live.”
Meaning & context
Drummond expresses his view that life depends on active relation with an environment, then uses that idea as an analogy within his Christian account of spiritual life.
Source details
Natural Law in the Spiritual World, represented by Project Gutenberg #23334. The sentence belongs to Drummond’s nineteenth-century attempt to analogize scientific language and Christian theology. It is retained as historical religious-philosophical argument, not a current biological law.
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“Rest, that is to say, is not a thing that can be given, but a thing to be acquired.”
Meaning & context
Drummond treats inward rest as a condition developed through changed habits and spiritual orientation rather than something another person can simply hand over.
Source details
Pax Vobiscum, represented by Project Gutenberg #9373. The sentence appears in Drummond’s Christian practical-theology discussion of rest and peace; its religious causal framework is historical devotional argument rather than clinical psychology.
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“Humility—to put a seal upon your lips and forget what you have done.”
Meaning & context
Drummond defines humility as allowing good work to remain larger than the ego that performed it: kindness is followed by a refusal to turn the act into self-advertisement or private self-congratulation.
Source details
“The Greatest Thing in the World,” in The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses, Project Gutenberg #16739. Drummond explicitly places Humility among the “ingredients” of Christian love and glosses it as love that does not vaunt itself.
