Hosea Ballou Quotes

Hosea Ballou (1771-1852) was an American Universalist clergyman and theologian, often called the father of American Universalism. He advocated for the universal salvation of all souls, rejecting the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and eternal damnation. Ballou’s influential writings and sermons helped shape the Universalist Church in America.

Quotes

25 quotes

Error is always more busy than truth.

Hosea Ballou

Tears of joy are like the summer rain drops pierced by sunbeams.

Hosea Ballou

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

Hosea Ballou

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.

Hosea Ballou

Education commences at the mother’s knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character.

Hosea Ballou

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

Hosea Ballou

Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.

Hosea Ballou

Exaggeration is a blood relation to falsehood and nearly as blamable.

Hosea Ballou

There is no such things as ‚best‘ in the world of individuals.

Hosea Ballou

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

Hosea Ballou

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Hosea Ballou

Hatred is self-punishment.

Hosea Ballou

Falsehood is cowardice, the truth courage.

Hosea Ballou

Energy, like the biblical grain of the mustard-seed, will remove mountains.

Hosea Ballou

Preaching is to much avail, but practice is far more effective. A godly life is the strongest argument you can offer the skeptic.

Hosea Ballou

Those who commit injustice bear the greatest burden.

Hosea Ballou

The oppression of any people for opinion’s sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

Hosea Ballou

No one has a greater asset for his business than a man’s pride in his work.

Hosea Ballou

Theories are always very thin and insubstantial, experience only is tangible.

Hosea Ballou

Never be so brief as to become obscure.

Hosea Ballou

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

Hosea Ballou

Never let your zeal outrun your charity. The former is but human, the latter is divine.

Hosea Ballou

Suspicion is far more to be wrong than right; more often unjust than just. It is no friend to virtue, and always an enemy to happiness.

Hosea Ballou

Religion which requires persecution to sustain, it is of the devil’s propagation.

Hosea Ballou

Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.

Hosea Ballou