Quotes from Unitarian Universalists

Famous people from our past include John Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Susan B. Anthony, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Clara Barton, Charles Darwin, Malvina Reynolds and Adlai Stevenson. See: Famous UUs.

"The freedom of the mind is the beginning of all other freedoms." - Clinton Lee Scott

"May your life preach more loudly than your lips." - William Elleery Channing

"You need not think alike to love alike." - Francis David

"Church is a place where you get to practice what it means to be human." - James Luther Adams

"Never lose a holy curiosity." - Albert Einstein

"We Unitarian Universalists have inherited a magnificent theological legacy. In a sweeping answer to creeds that divide the human family, Unitarianism proclaims that we spring from a common source; Universalism, that we share a common destiny."
- Forrest Church

"An idea is a curious thing. It will not work unless you do." - Jaeger's Facts

"Unitarian Universalism offers us a faith that challenges our energy usage and confronts us with hunger and injustice around the world without giving inadequate simplistic answers. It offers the harder path of respect for all beings and for the Earth, and calls us to be accountable for our actions. We are responsible for our own spirituality, our own salvation, and for doing all that we can to make the world better. "
- UU minister Rev. Bob Klein

Cherish your doubts, for doubt is the attendant of truth. Doubt is the key to the door of knowledge; it is the servant of discovery. A belief which may not be questioned binds us to error, for there is incompleteness and imperfection in every belief. Doubt is the touchstone of truth; it is an acid which eats away the false. Let no one fear for the truth, that doubt may consume it; for doubt is the testing of belief. The truth stands boldly and unafraid; it is not shaken by the testing.
- Robert T. Weston

"We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent upon its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed for our safety to its security and peace, preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and I will say the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it half-fortunate, half-miserable, and half-free in the liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolution depends the survival of us all."
- Adlai Stevenson

"I call that mind free which guards its intellectual rights and powers, which

• does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith,
• opens itself to receive new truth as an angel from heaven,
  
• is not the creature of accidental impulse,
  
• does not cower to human opinion,
  
• which resists the bondage of habit,
  
• sets no bounds to its love,
  
• delights in virtue and sympathizes with suffering,
  
• casts out all fear save that of wrongdoing."
  - William Ellery Channing

"I call that church free which enters into the convenant with the ultimate source of existence. It binds together families and generations, protecting against the idolatry of any human claim to absolute truth or authority."
- James Luther Adams

"Our generation has a mission, a clear and evident one; we have a compelling moral purpose which can direct our lives and our energies—literally, we are about saving the world. These days of challenge call us to put aside our pettiness and our little quarrels, our theological differences, and to focus on the larger issues. You don’t talk about the color of the drapes when the house is burning down."
- Rev. Marilyn Sewell of First Unitarian Church of Portland, Oregon, from a sermon October 2006 on “The Moral Dimensions of Global Warming”

"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. What I can do, I should do."  - Edward Everett Hale

"If you accept that God created everything, you have to accept that she created a universe with a great deal of diversity, with many, many ways of getting the same job done. I can look out my window and see literally hundreds of species of plants, dozens of species of birds, at night you can see big stars, little stars, and so on. Would it make sense, then, that that same God would turn around and say "you can only know me this one way, you must worship with only these sets of words, you must do things this way and no other"? I'm still thinking about that..." - Bluejay Adametz

“Theology is the reflection upon and criticism of meanings, values, and convictions. One person with a conviction is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only beliefs or feelings. Conviction … combines reason and feeling with the will to act.” - Rev. Richard S. Gilbert (In Introduction to Building Your Own Theology

"The reading which I love best is the scriptures of the several nations, though it happens that I am better acquainted with those of the Hindoos, the Chinese, and the Persians, than of the Hebrews, which I have come to last. Give me one of these bibles, and you have silenced me for awhile."
- Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1:72)

"I do not prefer one religion or philosophy to another. I have no sympathy with the bigotry and ignorance which make transient and partial and puerile distinctions between one man's faith or form of faith and another's - as Christian and heathen, I pray to be delivered from narrowness, partiality, exaggeration, bigotry. To the philosopher all sects, all nations, are alike. I like Brahma, Hari, Buddha, the Great Spirit, as well as God."
- Henry David Thoreau, Journal 1850.

"I am convinced that what is life-denying, what is repressive and false, will be known as such, and people, who are basically good, will follow a new way. Let us be some of those who step out and lead the way, who dare to be the Light that blesses the
world, that all the earth may be fair, and all her people one." - Marilyn Sewell

Quotes from Others

"A closed mind is like a closed book, just a block of wood." - Chinese proverb

"Hatred never ceases by hatred; but by love alone is healed."
- Buddha

"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom."
- Albert Einstein

"The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most elementary forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. What is the meaning of human life, or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion. Is there any sense then, you ask, in putting it? I answer, the man who regards his own life, and that of his fellow-creatures, as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life."
- Albert Einstein

"The Maxim [of the Golden Rule] does not imply that we should always do to others exactly that which we should wish under our own present circumstances (which may be quite different from theirs) to be done to us. What the maxim implies is that we are, as far as possible, to put ourselves in the place of others; to consider what we would wish to be done to us, were we in their circumstances." - W.A. Spooner

"We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all."
- John Muir (June 9, 1872 letter to Miss Catharine Merrill, from New Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite Valley, in Badè's Life and Letters of John Muir.

"God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason." - Dag Hammarskjold

"To be religious is not to feel, but to be." - Reinhold Niebuhr

"If you cannot find it in yourself, where will you go for it?" - Chinese proverb

"Unanswered questions are far less dangereous than unquestioned answers." - Anonymous

Heaven's  here on earth
         In our faith in humankind
         In our respect for what is earthly
         In our unfaltering belief in
         Peace and love and understanding."
- Tracy Chapman

"On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death...Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony."
- John Muir, in A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, p.41-42.