Hosea Ballou

A chaste and lucid style is indicative of the same personal traits in the author.

Duty itself is supreme delight when love is the inducement and labor. By such a principle the ignorant are enlightened, the hard-hearted softened, the disobedient reformed, and the faithful encouraged.

Hypocrisy is oftenest clothed in the garb of religion.

Man, being not only a religious, but also a social being, requires for the promotion of his rational happiness religious institutions, which, while they give a proper direction to devotion, at the same time make a wise and profitable improvement of his social feelings.

Pretension almost always overdoes the original, and hence exposes itself

The learning which makes us acquainted with ourselves, with the powers and faculties of the human mind, with divine truth, which is plainly revealed, with its power on the mind and heart, with the concatenations of cause and effect and to understand our everyday duty, which grows out of our wants and the wants of those about us, is learning of a better quality than that which only enables us to call things by different names, without giving us a knowledge of their qualities either for good or evil.

With regard to manner, be careful to speak in a soft, tender, kind and loving way. Even when you have occasion to rebuke, be careful to do it with manifest kindness. The effect will be incalculably better.

A good smile is the sunshine of wisdom.

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

I ask no truer image of my Heavenly Father than I find reflected in my own heart -- all loving, all forgiving.

Ministers who threaten death and destruction employ weapons of weakness. Argument and kindness are alone effectual, flavored by the principles of Divine love.

Prosperity is very liable to bring pride among the other goods with which it endows an individual; it is then that prosperity costs too dear.

The only infallible judge.

You cannot judge by outward appearances; the soul is only transparent to its Maker.

A mother?s love, in a degree, sanctifies the most worthless offspring.

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

I have somewhere read that conscience not only sits as witness and judge within our bosoms, but also forms the prison of punishment.

Most people who commit a sin count on some personal benefit to be derived therefrom, but profanity has not even this excuse.

Prosperity often presages adversity.

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.

A single bad habit will mar an otherwise faultless character, as an ink-drop soileth the pure white page.

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

I will be a slave to no habit; therefore farewell tobacco.

My lodging it is on the cold ground, and very hard is my fare, But that which troubles me most, is the unkindness of my dear.

Prosperity seems to be scarcely safe, unless it be mixed with a little adversity.