This continuation page contains additional source-backed quotations not shown in the initial 50-quotation overview. Return to the topic guide and browse collection.
“First keep thyself in peace, and then shalt thou be able to be a peacemaker towards others.”
The devotional instruction makes inward steadiness prior to outward peacemaking: a person who is internally ruled by agitation will struggle to reduce conflict in relationships around them.
The Imitation of Christ, Book II, Chapter III, “Of the good, peaceable man,” William Benham translation, Project Gutenberg #1653.
“Those things which a man cannot amend in himself or in others, he ought patiently to bear, until God shall otherwise ordain.”
The devotional advice separates attempted correction from patient endurance: when a fault cannot presently be changed, continued struggle to control it may need to give way to forbearance.
The Imitation of Christ, Book I, Chapter XVI, “Of bearing with the faults of others,” William Benham translation, Project Gutenberg #1653. The chapter advises patiently bearing what cannot presently be amended while also urging prayer and mutual forbearance; it remains Christian devotional counsel rather than permission to tolerate preventable harm.
“All true Work is sacred”
Carlyle gives honest work religious significance, arguing that the moral quality of labor matters beyond its immediate economic result.
Past and Present, Book III, Chapter XII, “Reward,” printed page 251 in Thomas Carlyle’s Collected Works, Library Edition, Vol. XIII (London: Chapman and Hall), Project Gutenberg #26159. “All true Work is sacred” begins Carlyle’s theological claim that true labour contains “something of divineness”; it remains Victorian religious and social-polemical rhetoric rather than an empirical claim about every form of employment.
“I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy.”
Paine’s profession of faith combines deistic belief with an ethical emphasis on equality, justice, mercy, and the practical happiness of other people.
The Age of Reason, Part I, Chapter I, “The Author’s Profession of Faith”; Moncure Daniel Conway collected/edited text represented by Project Gutenberg #3743 and cross-checked against Wikisource. The retained catalog wording says “I believe in the equality of man,” while the Conway/Gutenberg and Wikisource witness reads “I believe the equality of man.” This collection keeps its frozen legacy wording and discloses the edition-level variant rather than silently rewriting it. The passage is Paine’s deist profession of faith joining equality, justice, mercy and the happiness of fellow-creatures.
“Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from.”
Whitman radicalizes self-acceptance by describing the whole person as sacred, dissolving the boundary between an allegedly worthy interior and an unworthy physical exterior.
Song of Myself, 1882 text; the line belongs to Whitman’s intentionally expansive, bodily-spiritual poetic voice and should be read as poetry rather than literal theological doctrine.
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand and a Heaven in a Wild Flower.”
The image invites attention to scale and wonder, suggesting that profound meaning can appear inside ordinary and easily overlooked details.
Opening of “Auguries of Innocence”; Blake places vastness inside tiny natural forms.
“The great business of man's life, is to answer the end for which he lives;”
Penn frames a meaningful life in explicitly Christian terms: a person’s central task is to live toward the religious purpose for which Penn believes human life was given.
No Cross, No Crown, Preface, Project Gutenberg #44895. Penn opens by saying that the great business of life is to answer the end for which one lives, immediately defining that end as glorifying God and saving one’s soul. The frozen catalog retains only the opening clause. This is explicitly Quaker Christian devotional exhortation, not a neutral or universal factual definition of life’s purpose.
