The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 12 (of 12): Dresden Edition—MiscellanyIngersoll, Robert Green
Religion
The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. 12 (of 12): Dresden Edition—Miscellany
Ingersoll, Robert Green
Free thought
THE ORGAN.--The beginnings--the timidities--the half
thoughts--blushes--suggestions--a phrase of grace and feeling--a
sustained note--the wing on the wind--confidence--the flight--rising
with many harmonies that unite in the voluptuous swell--in the
passionate tremor--rising still higher--flooding the great dome with the
soul of enraptured sound.
*****
NEW MEXICO is a most wonderful country. It is a ragged miser with
billions of buried treasure. It looks as if Nature had guarded her
silver and gold with enough desolation to deter all but the brave.
*****
WHY SHOULD THE INDIAN SUMMER of a life be lost--the long, serene, and
tender days when earth and sky are friends? The falling leaves disclose
the ripened fruit--and so the flight of youth with dreams and fancies
should show the wealth of bending bough.
*****
Give milk to babes, and wine to youth. But for old age, when ghosts
of more than two-score years are wandering on the traveled road, the
fragrant tea, that loosens gossip's tongue, is best.--December 25,1892.
[From a letter thanking a friend for a Christmas present of
a chest of tea.]
*****
ON MEMORIAL DAY our hearts blossom in gratitude as we lovingly remember
the brave men upon whose brows Death, with fleshless hands, placed the
laurel wreath of fame.
*****
THE SOUL IS AN ARCHITECt--it builds a habitation for itself--and as the
soul is, is the habitation. Some live in dens and caves, and some in
lowly homes made rich with love, and overrun with vine and flower.
*****
SCIENCE at last holds with honest hand the scales wherein are weighed
the facts and fictions of the world. She neither kneels nor prays, she
stands erect and thinks. Her tongue is not a traitor to her brain. Her
thought and speech agree.
*****
THE NEGRO who can pass me in the race of life will receive my
admiration, and he can count on my friendship. No man ever lived who
proved his superiority by trampling on the weak.
*****
RELIGION is like a palm tree--it grows at the top. The dead leaves are
all orthodox, while the new ones and the buds are all heretics.
*****
MEMORY is the miser of the mind; forgetfulness the spendthrift.
*****
HOPE is the only bee that makes honey without flowers.
*****
THE FIRES OF THE NEXT WORLD sustain the same relation to churches that
those in this world sustain to insurance companies.
*****
Now and then there arises a man who on peril's edge draws from the
scabbard of despair the sword of victory.
*****
The falling leaf that tells of autumn's death is, in a subtler sense, a
prophecy of spring.
*****
Vice lives either before Love is born, or after Love is dead.
*****
Intellectual freedom is only the right to be honest.
*****
I believe that finally man will go through the phase of religion before
birth.
*****
When shrill chanticleer pierces the dull ear of morn.
*****
Orthodoxy is the refuge of mediocrity.
*****
The ocean is the womb of all that will be, the tomb of all that has
been.
*****
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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