John Tyndall Quotes
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With terrible jolts and oscillations the religious life of the world has run down 'the ringing grooves of change.' A smoother route may have been undiscoverable. At all events it was undiscovered.
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It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste.
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Discussion, therefore, is one of the motive powers of life, and, as such, is not to be deprecated.
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Of the future form of religion little can be predicted. Its main concern may possibly be to purify, elevate, and brighten the life that now is, instead of treating it as the more or less dismal vestibule of a life that is to come.
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The enunciation of a thought in advance of the moment provokes dissent or evokes approval, and thus promotes action. The thought may be unwise; but it is only by discussion, checked by experience, that its value can be determined.
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The Apocrypha... ought to be bound up with all your Bibles; it contains much that is beautiful and wise, and there is in history nothing finer than the description of Eleazar's end.
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We ought not to judge superior men without reference to the spirit of their age. This is an influence from which they cannot escape, and so far as it extenuates their errors it ought to be pleaded in their favour.
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The strength of faith is... no proof of the objective truth of faith.
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The brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they have been proved to have their counterparts in the world of fact.
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The mind of man may be compared to a musical instrument with a certain range of notes, beyond which in both directions we have an infinitude of silence.
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Life is a wave, which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles.
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Charles Darwin, the Abraham of scientific men - a searcher as obedient to the command of truth as was the patriarch to the command of God.
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Knowledge once gained casts a faint light beyond its own immediate boundaries.
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To legislation... the Puritans resorted. Instead of guiding, they repressed, and thus pitted themselves against the unconquerable impulses of human nature. Believing that nature to be depraved, they felt themselves logically warranted in putting it in irons. But they failed; and their failure ought to be a warning to their successors.
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Religion lives not by the force and aid of dogma, but because it is ingrained in the nature of man. ...the moulds have been broken and reconstructed over and over again, but the molten ore abides in the ladle of humanity.
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Science, which is the logic of nature, demands proportion between the house and its foundation. Theology sometimes builds weighty structures on a doubtful base.
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Knowledge and progress are the fruits of action.
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The most fatal error that could be committed by the leaders of religious thought is the attempt to force into their own age conceptions which have lived their life, and come to their natural end in preceding ages.
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Religious feeling is as much a verity as any other part of human consciousness; and against it, on the subjective side, the waves of science beat in vain.
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Superstition may be defined as constructive religion which has grown incongruous with intelligence.
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Christ found the religions of the world oppressed almost to suffocation by the load of formulas piled upon them by the priesthood. He removed the load, and rendered respiration free. He cared little for forms and ceremonies, which had ceased to be the raiment of man's spiritual life. To that life he looked, and it he sought to restore.
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When arguments or proofs were needed, whether on the side of the Jewish Christians or of the Gentile Christians, a document was discovered which met the case, and on which the name of an apostle, or of some authoritative contemporary of the apostles, was boldly inscribed. The end being held to sanctify the means, there was no lack of manufactured testimony.
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The yoke of religion has not always been easy, nor its burden light-a result arising, in part from the ignorance of the world at large, but more especially from the mistakes of those who had the charge and guidance of a great spiritual force, and who guided it blindly.
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To Principal Caird... imaging of the Unseen is of inestimable value. It furnishes an objective counterpart to religious emotion, permanent but plastic-capable of indefinite change and purification in response to the changing thoughts and aspirations of mankind.