William Edward Hartpole Lecky Quotes
Anxiety and Ennui are the Scylla and Charybdis on which the bark of human happiness is most often wrecked.
There are times in the lives of most of us, when we would have given all the world to be as we were but yesterday, though that yesterday had passed over us unappreciated and unenjoyed.
The simple record of these three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the discourses of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists.
Passions weaken, but habits strengthen, with age, and it is the great task of youth to set the current of habit and to form the tastes which are most productive of happiness in life.
The unweary, unostentatious, and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in the history of nations.
In proportion to its power, Protestantism has been as persecuting as Catholicism.
The contraction of theological influence has been at once the best measure, and the essential condition of intellectual advance.
One of the most important lessons that experience teaches is that, on the whole, success depends more upon character than upon either intellect or fortune.
The Augustinian doctrine of the damnation of unbaptized infants and the Calvinistic doctrine of reprobation . . . surpass in atrocity any tenets that have ever been admitted into any pagan creed.
Whenever the clergy were at the elbow of the civil arm, no matter whether they were Catholic or Protestant, persecution was the result.
Physical science has taught us to associate Deity with the normal rather than with the abnormal.
There have certainly been many periods in history when virtue was more rare than under the Caesars; but there has probably never been a period when vice was more extravagant or uncontrolled.
Almost all Europe, for many centuries, was inundated with blood, which was shed at the direct instigation or with the full approval of the ecclesiastical authorities.
Pleasures that are in themselves innocent lose their power of pleasing if they become the sole or main object of pursuit.
All history shows that, in exact proportion as nations advance in civilisation, the accounts of miracles taking place among them become rarer and rarer, until at last they entirely cease.
There is no possible line of conduct which has at some time and place been condemned, and which has not at some other time and place been enjoined as a duty.
The doctrine of a material hell in its effect was to chill and deaden the sympathies, predispose men to inflict suffering, and to retard the march of civilization.
Fierce invectives against women form a conspicuous and grotesque portion of the writings of the Church fathers.
There is no wild beast so ferocious as Christians who differ concerning their faith.
That vice has often proved an emancipator of the mind, is one of the most humiliating, but, at the same time, one of the most unquestionable facts in history.