Explore Quotes by Joseph Fort Newton

To be happy is easy enough if we give ourselves, forgive others, and live with thanksgiving, No self centered person, no ungrateful soul can ever be happy, much less make anyone else happy. Life is giving, not getting.

Masonry was not made to divide men, but to unite them, leaving each man free to think his own thoughts and fashion his own system of ultimate truth. All its emphasis rests upon two extremely simple and profound principles, love of God and love of man.

More than an institution, more than a tradition, more than a society, Masonry is one of the forms of Divine life upon earth.

Masonry is too great an institution to have been made in a day, much less by a few men, but was a slow evolution through long time, unfolding its beauty as it grew. Indeed, it was like one of its own cathedrals which one generation of builders wrought and vanished, and another followed, until, amidst vicissitudes of time and change, of decline and revival, the order itself became a temple of Freedom and Fraternity.

Masonry superadds to our other obligations the strongest ties of connection between it and the cultivation of virtue, and furnishes the most powerful incentives to goodness.

Each lodge is an oasis if equality and good will in a desert of strife, working to wield mankind into a great league of sympathy and services, which, by the terms of our definition, it seeks to exhibit now on a small scale.

Love is lost in immensities; it comes in simple, gentle ways.

Every person has a train of thought on which they travel when they are alone. The dignity and nobility of their life, as well as their happiness depend upon the direction in which that train is going, the baggage it carries and the scenery through which it travels.

Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.

A duty dodged is like a debt unpaid; it is only deferred, and we must come back and settle the account at last.

Belief is truth held in the mind; faith is a fire in the heart.

We cannot tell what may happen to us in the strange medley of life. But we can decide what happens in us - how we can take it, what we do with it - and that is what really counts in the end.