"John Bunyan" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... afford to suffer in the darkness, alone and uncomforted, if angels will but visit us. John Bunyan can well be content in Bedford gaol, if God but puts a dream in his head and heart that will last in the memories and characters of men, when the sun is a burned-out cinder and the stars are dying ash heaps. We can well be satisfied to have sorrows unutterable and griefs inexpressible, if heavenly ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... shoe-blacking factory. William Shakespeare's father made gloves. Benjamin Franklin was the son of a candlemaker. Daniel Defoe, who wrote that Robinson Crusoe you love so much, helped his father around the butcher shop. John Bunyan was a traveling tinker. And Christopher Columbus was the son of a wool comber, and himself ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... nadir." In Edinburgh, which Burns reached in November, 1786, he was introduced by Blacklock to all the literati, and within a fortnight he was writing to a friend: "I am in a fair way of becoming as eminent as Thomas a Kempis or John Bunyan; and you may expect to see my birthday inscribed among the wonderful events in the Poor Robin and Aberdeen Almanacks, along with the Black Monday and the Battle ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... the non-voting classes is an idea that gives us pause. It is one of those suggestions, like Lord Brougham's of the "unknown public," which, in a single phrase, and a sentence or two of explanation, tell a whole history. This is the class John Bunyan wrote for before the bishops had his Allegory in presentable calf and gold-leaf,—before England knew that her poor tinker had shaped a pictured urn for her full of such visions as no dreamer had seen since Dante. This is the class that believes in John Bright and Richard Cobden and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... of Mr Badman was published by John Bunyan in 1680, two years after the First Edition of the First Part of The Pilgrim's Progress. In the opening sentence of his preface he tells us it was intended by him as the counterpart or companion picture to the Allegory. But whatever his own intentions ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... Spirituality is better than money. He who has made an idol of his wealth, who in gaining it has lost his soul, who has allowed money to come between him and God, has paid too great a price for it. He has well been depicted by John Bunyan as the man with the muck-rake gathering straws, whilst he does not see the golden crown that is held above him. Christ tells us God regards such a man ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... serves, first, as a great religious teacher. Second, it stands as a model of literature whose greatness is everywhere acknowledged. Men like John Bunyan and Abraham Lincoln learned to write their beautiful prose through their close, continued reading of the Scriptures. No finer poetry exists than the Psalms of David, among which the following ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... after our arrival in Liverpool I breakfasted with that eminent clergyman, Dr. Raffles, who boasted the possession of one of the finest collections of autographs in England. He showed me the signature of John Bunyan; the original manuscript of one of Sir Walter Scott's novels; the original of Burns' poem addressed to the parasite on a lady's bonnet, which contained the ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... impossible by the ordinary cultivated reader, but he will please to recollect John Bunyan's account of the strange behaviour of Mr. Tod. "At a summer assizes holden at Hertford," says Bunyan, "while the judge was sitting up on the bench, comes this old Tod into court, clothed in a green suit, with his leathern girdle in his hand, his bosom open, and all in a dung sweat, as if ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... only momentary." He wondered now what had so moved him. "I am like good old John Bunyan's Pilgrim,"—laughing faintly,—"'tumbled up and down' with these excitements. I wish they were at an end. We were going on so nicely when that McPherson came! Don't let us think any more about it," ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... be hanged, and that forthwith, we may take it that they are resolved, as "Christmas" was, to quit the City of Destruction; and the saints above have learnt not to be fastidious as they bend over repentant rogues. Thanks to the grace of God and John Bunyan's book, husband and wife triumphantly aspire to and attain the gallows; "they were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided." A wise economy of spiritual force!—for while their effectual calling cannot be gainsaid, the final ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... the instinct of a poetic soul, he invented a parable and gravely gave it a historic setting "over in Sangamon County." For although upon his intellectual side the man was a subtle and severe logician, on his emotional side he was a lover of the concrete and human. He was always, like John Bunyan, dreaming and seeing "a man" who symbolized something apposite to the occasion. Thus even his invented stories aided his marvelous capacity for statement, for specific illustration of a general law. Lincoln's destiny was to be that ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... please the churchwoman, he related how, when imprisoned for popping a toad into the soup, he had escaped over the leads, and had beaten a drum outside the barn, during a discourse of the godly tinker, John Bunyan, tramping and rattling so that all thought the troopers were come, and rushed out, tumbling one over the other, while he yelled out his "Ho! ho! ho!" from the ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... other hand to acquiesce in the converging use of many means which cannot, by the nature of the case, appear equally efficacious to every one. Such a toleration, such an adoption of the different modes of carrying on what John Bunyan called "the Holy War," "the Siege of Man's Soul," must indeed be always controlled by the determination to keep the high, paramount, universal end always in view; by the vigilant endeavor to repress the exaggeration, to denounce the follies and the falsehoods which infect even the best ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... "with a crab-tree cudgel." On Saturday night Christian remembered he had a key in his bosom, called "Promise," which would open any lock in Doubting Castle. So he opened the dungeon door, and they both made their escape with speed.—John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... and edgewise. Thus, I observed that it was necessary for the members to be knocked on the head with Gas, Air, Water, Food, the Solar System, the Geological periods, Criticism on Milton, the Steam-engine, John Bunyan, and Arrow-Headed Inscriptions, before they might be tickled by those unaccountable choristers, the negro singers in the court costume of the reign of George the Second. Likewise, that they must be stunned ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... led to employ, eighteen hundred years ago, a phraseology which the researches of our own day have now for the first time shown to be philosophically exact? Speaking of this verse, and quoting it freely, John Bunyan ("Reign of Antichrist,") says, 'For the earthquake, it is said to be such as never was, so mighty an earthquake and so great.' He thought the phrase, 'since men were upon the earth,' was equivalent to 'never:' so he wrote and fell ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... pleasing a feature in the bosom of the valley, pale and fade from sight; the lofty walls of the old Mission of San Gabriel were no longer visible Suddenly from out the silence and gathering shades fell upon our ears a chime so musical and sweet, so spiritually clear and delicate, that had honest John Bunyan heard it he might well have deemed himself arrived at the land of Beulah. * * * It was the hour of vespers at the ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... in England for religion's sake was a poor tinker and day laborer named John Bunyan. He had served against the King in the civil wars, and later had become converted to Puritanism, and turned exhorter and itinerant preacher. He was arrested, while preaching in a farmhouse, and convicted of having "devilishly and perniciously ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... more than an enjoyment of the natural buoyancy of youth, and a want of the deeper earnestness which comes with riper years. In imaginative tempers, like that of Bunyan, the struggle took a more picturesque form. John Bunyan was the son of a poor tinker at Elstow in Bedfordshire, and even in childhood his fancy revelled in terrible visions of Heaven and Hell. "When I was but a child of nine or ten years old," he tells us, "these things did so ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... an unusually clear statement of the debt of a man of affairs to literature: "From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' my first collection was of John Bunyan's works in separate little volumes.... My father's little library consisted chiefly of books on polemic divinity, most of which I read, and have since often regretted that, at a time when I had such a thirst for knowledge, more proper books had not fallen in my way, since it was ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... goose you keep but base quills, They're fit for nothing else but pasquils. I've often heard it from the wise, That inflammations in the eyes Will quickly fall upon the tongue, And thence, as famed John Bunyan sung, From out the pen will presently On paper dribble daintily. Suppose I call'd you goose, it is hard One word should stick thus in your gizzard. You're my goose, and no other man's; And you know, all my geese are swans: Only ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... such variety and contrast of experience. Perhaps it will by and by appear that our own civil war has done something for us in this way. Colonel Higginson comes down from his pulpit to draw on his jackboots, and thenceforth rides in our imagination alongside of John Bunyan and Bishop Compton. To have stored moral capital enough to meet the drafts of Death at sight, must be an unmatched tonic. We saw our light-hearted youth come back with the modest gravity of age, as if they had learned to throw out pickets against a surprise of any weak point in their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... portrait of John Bunyan was drawn and engraved by White, to the Holy War, 1682. The original drawing, and a fine impression of the engraving, is preserved in the illustrated Grainger's History of England, in the print-room at the British Museum. It was copied in folio for Bunyan's Works. It has been ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 66, February 1, 1851 • Various
... John Bunyan, author of the "Pilgrim's Progress," was co-pastor in a Baptist Meeting House, in Mill-lane, from 1671 until his death in 1688. The chair in which he used to sit is still preserved in the vestry as ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... 'Attempts' of the good old butler of Kirby Hall, the rest being given to a chapter of our literary history from his editor's own pen, which, we venture to say, will be not less generally attractive than the "Life of John Bunyan," ...
— Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 475 - Vol. XVII, No. 475. Saturday, February 5, 1831 • Various
... this utterance at all, 'touching the righteousness which is in the law' I was 'blameless.' And yet, 'I am chief.' So all true men who have ever shown us their heart, in telling their Christian faith, have repeated Paul's statement; from Augustine in his wonderful Confessions, to John Bunyan in his Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. And then prosaic men have said, 'What profligates they must have been, or what exaggerators they are now!' No. Sewer gas of the worst sort has no smell; and the most poisonous exhalations ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... year 1647 I was moved of the Lord to go into Darbyshire." Fox hears voices and he sees visions, some of which he brings before the reader with apocalyptic power in the simple and strong English, alike untutored and undefiled, of which, like John Bunyan, his contemporary, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... a big place; but people are always forgetting what a variety of humanity it contains. Two hundred years ago, the authorities of Bedford made it very unpleasant for one John Bunyan, because they thought they knew everything, and could not imagine that a common street workman might know more. The trade of a tinker seems an unpromising preparation for a literary career. A tinker ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... out my hand and took down the first it encountered—John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. It was a funny old volume—a priceless early edition given me by a grateful client whom I had extricated from some embarrassment. I had never read it, but I knew its general ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train |
