The poor steamer foundered because it drifted…the man who has no aim higher than himself also drifts…Do not drift, but steer.
James Freeman Clarke, Everyday Religion (1886) p.6 (Unitarian, clergy, reformer)
If we could read the secret history of those we would like to punish, we would find in each life a sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all our hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Unitarian, poet)
Conscience…prepares the mind to act and to suffer beyond almost all other causes
Daniel Webster, “First Settlement of New England, Delivered 22 December 1820” (Unitarian, statesman, U.S. Senator)
We cannot be tactful with those whose point of view we fail to understand, or do not even strive to understand
Mary Ellen Richmond, Friendly Visiting Among the Poor (1906) p.14 (Unitarian, social worker, author, a developer of social work and research)
We are not that we are, nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for that we are capable of being.
Henry David Thoreau (Transcendentalist, Unitarian, surveyor, philosopher, naturalist)
The imagination, once awakened, must and will work, and ought to work
Harriet Martineau, Household Education (Unitarian, author, reformer, journalist)
A vast bulk of unkindness is done in sudden passion; and a worse kind, more hurtful, though not so plentiful, is done in obstinate and prolonged fevers of hatred, which are the most unreasonable and inexcusable manner of the lack of calmness
James Vila Blake, More Than Kin (1896) p.111 (Unitarian, hymnist, clergy)
A hundred thousand new-born babes are annually added to the victims of slavery; twenty thousand lives are annually sacrificed on the plantations of the South. Such a sight should send a thrill of horror through the nerves of civilization and impel the heart of humanity to lofty deeds. So it might, if men had no found a fearful alchemy by which this blood can be transformed into gold. Instead of listening to the cry of agony, they listen to the ring of dollars and stoop down to pick up the coin
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “Could We Trace the Record of Every Human Heart” New York Anti-Slavery Society (1857) (Unitarian, journalist, abolitionist, suffragist, reformer, club-woman)
The mother’s yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the base, degraded man.
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) (Unitarian, author)
Whatsoe’er our lot may be
Calmly in this thought we’ll rest, —
Could we see as Thou dost see,
We should choose it as the best
William Gaskell (Unitarian, clergy, charity worker, social reformer, educator)
