C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Toleration
The religion that fosters intolerance needs another Christ to die for it.
Tolerance does not mark the progress of a religion. It is the fatal sign of its decline.
Toleration is the best religion.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
A fallible being will fail somewhere.
Every man must get to heaven his own way.
Let us often think of our own infirmities, and we shall become indulgent toward those of others.
Tolerance is the only real test of civilization.
I would have all intoleration intolerated in its turn.
The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.
We are all of one dying, one immortal family.
It is intolerance to speak of toleration. Away with the word from the dictionary!
Hardly a man will you find who could live with his door open.
The knowledge beyond all other knowledge is the knowledge how to excuse.
Has not God borne with you these many years? Be ye tolerant to others.
If thou canst not make thyself such an one as thou wouldst, how canst thou expect to have another in all things to thy liking?
Let those who celebrate by name, by waxlight at noonday, tolerate such as are content with the light of the sun.
Generosity is in nothing more seen than in a candid estimation of other men’s virtues and good qualities.
Let us be very gentle with our neighbors’ failings, and forgive our friends their debts as we hope ourselves to be forgiven.
The moderation and toleration of the priests of any sect are in an inverse ratio to its authority and power.
No human power can force the entrenchments of the human mind: compulsion never persuades it; only makes hypocrites.
Choose out the wisest, brightest, noblest of mankind, and how many of them could bear to be pursued into the little corners of their lives?
He (Charles Lamb) had felt, thought, and suffered so much that he literally had intolerance for nothing.
There is nothing to do with men but to love them; to contemplate their virtues with admiration, their faults with pity and forbearance, and their injuries with forgiveness.
Let us people who are so uncommonly clever and learned have a great tenderness and pity for the poor folks who are not endowed with the prodigious talents which we have.
They who boast of their tolerance merely give others leave to be as careless about religion as they are themselves. A walrus might as well pride itself on its endurance of cold.
It requires far more of constraining love of Christ to love our cousins and neighbors as members of the heavenly family than to feel the heart warm to our suffering brethren in Tuscany and Madeira.
Be thankful that your lot has fallen on times when, though there may be many evil tongues and exasperated spirits, there are none who have fire and fagot at command.
Men in excess of happiness or misery are equally inclined to severity. Witness conquerors and monks! It is mediocrity alone, and a mixture of prosperous and adverse fortune that inspire us with lenity and pity.
No one, judging from his own feelings and powers, can be aware of the kind or degree of temptation or terror, or the seeming incapacity to resist them, which may induce others to deviate.
I would recommend a free commerce both of matter and mind. I would let men enter their own churches with the same freedom as their own houses; and I would do it without a homily or graciousness or favor, for tyranny itself is to me a word less odious than toleration.
Whenever we cease to hate, to despite, and to persecute those who think differently from ourselves, whenever we look on them calmly, we find among them men of pure hearts and unbiased judgments, who, reasoning on the same data with ourselves, have arrived at different conclusion on the subject of the spiritual world.
What higher praise can we bestow on any one than to say of him that he harbors another’s prejudices with a hospitality so cordial as to give him, for the time, the sympathy next best to, if indeed it be not edification in, charity itself. For what disturbs more and distracts mankind than the uncivil manners that cleave man from man?
Let us all resolve, first, to attain the grace of silence; second, to deem all fault-finding that does no good a sin, and to resolve, when we are ourselves happy, not to poison the atmosphere for our neighbors by calling upon them to remark every painful and disagreeable feature in their daily life, third, to practice the grace and virtue of praise.
Have charity; have patience; have mercy. Never bring a human being, however silly, ignorant, or weak—above all, any little child—to shame and confusion of face. Never by petulance, by suspicion, by ridicule, even by selfish and silly haste—never, above all, by indulging in the devilish pleasure of a sneer—crush what is finest and rouse up what is coarsest in the heart of any fellow-creature.