Robert Collyer (clergyman)

God hides some ideal in every human soul. At some time in our life we feel a trembling, fearful longing to do some good thing. Life finds its noblest spring of excellence in this hidden impulse to do our best.

Robert Collyer (December 8, 1823 – November 30, 1912) was an American Unitarian clergyman.

Quotes

Old age is the repose of life, the rest that precedes the rest that remains.

• God hides some ideal in every human soul. At some time in our life we feel a trembling, fearful longing to do some good thing. Life finds its noblest spring of excellence in this hidden impulse to do our best.
  • The Fear of God. A Sermon: Preached in Unity Church, Chicago, on Sunday Morning, November 9, 1862 (Chicago: Tribune Book and Job Steam Printing Office, 1862) p. 14

• Faith...makes the discords of the present, the harmonies of the future.
  • Nature and Life: Sermons (Boston: Horace B. Fuller, 1867) I. "Root and Flower", p. 4

• Old age is the repose of life,—the rest that precedes the rest that remains.
  • The Life That Now Is (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1871) XV. "Old Age", p. 303
  • Compare: Philemon 1:9

• Atheism could never be an institution in this country; it could never be more than a destitution.
  • Sermon, March 5, 1882, quoted in The New York Times, vol. 31, no. 9,514 (March 6, 1882) p. 8, col. 1. Slightly different version quoted in Josiah H. Gilbert, Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (Troy, NY: H. B. Nims and Co, 1883) p. 218: "Ingersoll's atheism can never become an institution; it can never be more than a destitution."

• The things we do at Christmas are touched with a certain grain of extravagance, as beautiful in some of its aspects as the extravagance of nature in June.
  • The Simple Truth (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1884) X. "A Carol with a Caution", p. 147

Robert Collyer to Young Men (1888)

College lecture. Reprinted in the Norfolk Virginian. Quoted in The Unitarian, vol. 3, no. 3 (March 1888) p. 126

• Work is good medicine.

• A man's best friends are his ten fingers.

• Society often says one thing and nature says another.

• Any kind of an honest job is better than no job at all.

• Have a reserve force that will come out when you need it.

• The man who dies poor is rich if he only holds fast his honesty and his hope.

• Only those who make clean money and do clean things win success.

• A good day's work at what you can best do is the hard-pan to which all must come.

• When country boys come to the city, if they only can hold on to the old sweet ways, they can defy the world.

• Sleep eight hours out of the twenty-four, eat three meals a day, and walk on the sunny side of the street.

• Keep your grip on good principles and good conduct, and you will be men of good name and of good fortune.

• When a boy fills a house with bugs he is all right, provided he don't run after humbugs. He has the making in him of a great naturalist.

• A good farmer is better than a poor doctor, and a good horse-shoer is better than a poor bishop.

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Robert Collyer (clergyman) on Wikipedia