Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) was an English writer and Anglican priest who wrote many historical novels, including Hypatia (1853,) Hereward the Wake (1865) and Westward Ho (1855.)
Kingsley is best remembered for his popular children’s book The Water-Babies (1863,) written to teach unconditional love, redemption, and other Christian values. The Water-Babies is an allegorical fairytale of a 10-year-old, chimney-sweeping orphan named Tom. While clearing soot one day, Tom falls through a chimney into the room of a rich young girl named Ellie. Mistaken for a thief, Tom is chased out of town. Overwhelmed by exhaustion, he submits to thirst, tumbles into a stream, falls fast asleep, and drowns. Fairies turn him into a peculiar creature called a “water-baby.” In his new life, Tom meets various fairies, aquatic creatures, and other water-babies. When he reaches the Other-End-of-Nowhere, he helps his vicious former master Mr. Grimes find repentance.
The Water-Babies was extremely popular when it was published, and it helped rally support for the 1840 Chimney Sweepers’ Regulation Act, which prohibited the use of child labor to climb into and clean chimneys.
However, The Water-Babies lost its popularity over time because of its insults against the Irish, Catholics, Jews, Americans, and the poor, even if Kingsley’s writing merely reflected many of the common prejudices of his time.
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Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Work, Excellence
What I want is, not to possess religion, but to have a religion that shall possess me.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Religion
Do noble things, do not dream them all day long.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Action, Procrastination, Getting Going, Inaction
The world goes up and the world goes down, the sunshine follows the rain; and yesterday’s sneer and yesterday’s frown can never come over again.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Change, Rain
The age of chivlary is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.
—Charles Kingsley
If you wish to be miserable, think about yourself; about what you want, what you like, what respect people ought to pay you, what people think of you; and then to you nothing will be pure. You will spoil everything you touch; you will make sin and misery for yourself out of everything God sends you; you will be as wretched as you choose.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Selfishness
Stick to the old truths and the old paths, and learn their divineness by sick beds, and in everyday work, and do not darken your mind with intellectual puzzles, which may breed disbelief, but can never breed vital religion or practical usefulness.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Truth
If I am ever obscure in my expressions, do not fancy that therefore I am deep. If I were really deep, all the world would understand, though they might not appreciate. The perfectly popular style is the perfectly scientific one. To me an obscurity is a reason for suspecting a fallacy.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Style
The men whom I have seen succeed best in life always have been cheerful and hopeful men; who went about their business with a smile on their faces; and took the changes and chances of this mortal life like men; facing rough and smooth alike as it came.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Hope
Do today’s duty, fight today’s temptation; do not weaken and distract yourself by looking forward to things you cannot see, and could not understand if you saw them.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Work, The Present, Duty, Present
We shall be made truly wise if we be made content; content, too, not only with what we can understand, but content with what we do not understand-the habit of mind which theologians call, and rightly, faith in God.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Contentment
As the rays come from the sun, and yet are not the sun, even so our love and pity, though they are not God, but merely a poor, weak image and reflection of Him, yet from him alone they come.
—Charles Kingsley
Feelings are like chemicals; the more you analyze them the worse they smell.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Feelings
Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do which must be done, whether you like it or not.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Gratitude, Blessings
He was one of those men who possess almost every gift, except the gift of the power to use them.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Common Sense
What’s the use of doing a kindness, if you do it a day too late.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Kindness, Compassion, Service
There are two freedoms—the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Freedom, Liberty
There is a great deal of human nature in man.
—Charles Kingsley
We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Happiness, Enthusiasm, Life, Goals, Love, Aspirations, Luxury
So fleet the works of men, back to their earth again;Ancient and holy things fade like a dream.
—Charles Kingsley
Nothing is so infectious as example.
—Charles Kingsley
Topics: Example
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