What seems to us to be funeral tapers may be heaven’s distant lamps.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Unitarian, poet)
With every anguish of our earthly part the spirit’s sight grows clearer…
James Russell Lowell (Unitarian, poet, statesman, playwright, critic)
Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Transcendentalist, Unitarian, Quaker, philosopher, author, editor)
The heart makes some things beautiful to us — more beautiful than the most elaborate workmanship of nature or of art. The affections never yet clung to one earthly object without investing it with a touching loveliness…
Sarah Edgerton Mayo, in a letter to a friend, Memoirs of Mrs. S.C.E. Mayo with Selections From Her Writings p. 68 (Universalist, poet, author, editor)
Those old ages are like the landscape that shows best in purple distance, all verdant and smooth, and bathed in mellow light
E. H. Chapin (Universalist, minister)
How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.
Charles Darwin (Unitarian, naturalist, author Origin of Species)
No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) (Unitarian, author)
While we overlook hours of pleasure, we are strict to mark every moment of pain. If for one night in a whole year we suffer keenly, we dwell upon it ever after, and call it long and lingering; and yet we often speak of the rapidity of the flight of time, and are astonished to think how quick the year has passed away
O. H. Tillotson, The Natural and Spiritual Bodies, The Universalist Pulpit (1858) p.149 (Universalist, minister)
The discoverer finds nothing so grand or tall as himself, nothing so valuable to him. The greatest star is at the small end of the telescope, the star that is looking, not looked after nor looked at
Theodore Parker (Transcendentalist, Unitarian, abolitionist, reformer, minister)
…if you are sceptical as to the essential worth of Freedom, just allow yourself to be locked up for a while, with no clear prospect of liberation at any specified or definite time.
Horace Greeley (Universalist, journalist, editor, reformer)
