Truth loves its limits, for there it meets the beautiful.
Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies (Brahmo Samaj, nationalist, poet, playwright, reformer)
Life may be given in many ways and loyalty to truth be sealed as bravely in the closet as the field.
James Russell Lowell (Unitarian, poet, diplomat, reformer)
Error is always more busy than truth.
Hosea Ballou (Universalist, clergy)
We must not trifle with other minds, nor dispute with them for victory, nor pride ourselves upon overreaching them by our own power or subtlety. In dealing with other men we should only care to find their truth, and increase it by gifts from our own; not to abuse them by making them ashamed of what they have.
A.D. Mayo (Amory Dwight Mayo), Graces and Powers of a Christian Life (1852) p.54 (Universalist, clergy, educator)
Of all happy households, that is the happiest, where falsehood is never thought of. All peace is broken up when once it appears that there is a liar in the house.
Harriet Martineau, Household Education (Unitarian, author, reformer, journalist)
We want such an access of truth that the general mind can be fed with a worthier conception of God, which will make every thought of him inspiring as the dawn of the morning, and will banish the superstition that this life is the final state of probation as an insult to his plan of eternal education and a chimera of a barbarous age.
Thomas Starr King (Universalist, Unitarian, clergy)
The greatest truths are wronged if not linked with beauty, and they win their way most surely and deeply into the soul, when arranged in this their natural and fit attire
William Ellery Channing (Unitarian, clergy)
To think truth is the worship of the head; to do noble works of usefulness and charity the worship of the will; to feel love and trust in man and God, is the glad worship of the heart
Theodore Parker, “The True Idea of A Christian Church…Jan 4, 1846” Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons vol. 1 (Transcendentalist, Unitarian, reformer, abolitionist, minister)
Those old stories of visions and dreams guiding men have their truth: we are saved by making the future present to ourselves
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) (Unitarian, author)
True love is never a great babbler, talking nonsense in the name of wit, or putting on the buffoon to hide the ass. It looks and does more than it says.
Henry Birdsall Soule (Universalist, author, minister) quoted by Caroline Augusta Soule, Memoir of Rev. H.B. Soule (1852) p.198
