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Frank Crane Quotes

Dr. Frank Crane was a Presbyterian minister, speaker, and columnist who wrote a set of ten volumes of "Four Minute Essays" which were published in 1919. Previously, in 1918, he published the book "21", from an article he had written for American Magazine, called "If I Were Twenty-One". He later penned a much longer treatise entitled "Everyday Wisdom", which was published in 1927. This leather-bound book was subtitled 'A page for every day of the year', and consisted of 365 Four Minute Essays and 52 Little Talks on How to Live. Only scarce remnants of his works on positive thinking and a populist political philosophy have survived for reflection by modern readers. Wikipedia  

✵ 1861 – 1928
Frank Crane: 38   quotes 2   likes

Famous Frank Crane Quotes

“The human heart to youth is a fairy-land of adventure, to old age it is a sitting room where one knows his way in the dark.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

“The human heart is an egg; and out of it are hatched this world and heaven and hell.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

“How to get stimulation out of simple food and water drink, and not alcohol.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living

“The human heart is a meadow full of fireflies, a summer western sky of shimmering distant lightnings, a shore set round with flashing lighthouses, far-away voices calling that we cannot understand.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

“The human heart is a great city, teeming with myriad people, full of business and mighty doings, and we wander its crowded streets unutterably alone; we do not know what it is all about.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

“The human heart is a tangled wood wherein no man knows his way.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

Frank Crane Quotes about heart

“The human heart is a wide moor under a dull sky, with voices of invisible birds calling in the distance.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

“The human heart is a great green tree, and many strange birds come and sing in its branches; a few build nests, but most are from far lands north and south, and never come again.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

“The human heart is an undiscovered country; men and women are forever perishing as they explore its wilds.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

“The human heart is a cup of love, where some find life and zest, and some drunkenness and death.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

“The human heart is a band playing in a park at a distance; we see the crowds listening, but we catch but fragments of the music now and again, and cannot make out the tune.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

“The human heart is a lonely lane in the evening, and two lovers are walking down it, whispering and lingering.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

Frank Crane Quotes about love

“THERE is a passage of Holy Writ that exhorts us that if there be any good things, such as love, virtue, truth, and so on, we ought to think on these things.”

Frank Crane

Everyday Wisdom (1927)

“Bend close! You will smell the lily fragrance of love, the stench of lust, now odors as exquisite as the very spirit of violets, and now such nauseous repulsions as words cannot tell.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

“Listen! You will hear mothers' lullabies, madmen's shrieks, love-croonings, cries of agonized terror, hymns of Christ, the roaring of lynch mobs, the kisses of lovers, the curses of pirates.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

Frank Crane Quotes

“Better than big business is clean business.
To an honest man the most satisfactory reflection after he has amassed his dollars is not that they are many but that they are all clean.
What constitutes clean business? The answer is obvious enough, but the obvious needs restating every once in a while.
"A clean profit is one that has also made a profit for the other fellow."
This is fundamental moral axiom in business. Any gain that arises from another's loss is dirty.
Any business whose prosperity depends upon damage to any other business is a menace to the general welfare.
That is why gambling, direct or indirect, is criminal, why lotteries are prohibited by law, and why even gambling slot-machine devices are not tolerated in civilized countries. When a farmer sells a housekeeper a barrel of apples, when a milkman sells her a quart of milk, or the butcher a pound of steak, or the dry-goods man a yard of muslin, the housekeeper is benefited quite as much as those who get her money.
That is the type of honest, clean business, the kind that helps everybody and hurts nobody. Of course as business becomes more complicated it grows more difficult to tell so clearly whether both sides are equally prospered. No principle is automatic. It requires sense, judgment, and conscience to keep clean; but it can be done, nevertheless, if one is determined to maintain his self-respect. A man that makes a habit, every deal he goes into, of asking himself, "What is there in it for the other fellow?" and who refuses to enter into any transaction where his own gain will mean disaster to some one else, cannot go for wrong.
And no matter how many memorial churches he builds, nor how much he gives to charity, or how many monuments he erects in his native town, any man who has made his money by ruining other people is not entitled to be called decent. A factory where many workmen are given employment, paid living wages, and where health and life are conserved, is doing more real good in the world than ten eleemosynary institutions.
The only really charitable dollar is the clean dollar. And the nasty dollar, wrung from wronged workmen or gotten by unfair methods from competitors, is never nastier than when it pretends to serve the Lord by being given to the poor, to education, or to religion. In the long run all such dollars tend to corrupt and disrupt society.
Of all vile money, that which is the most unspeakably vile is the money spent for war; for war is conceived by the blundering ignorance and selfishness of rulers, is fanned to flame by the very lowest passions of humanity, and prostitutes the highest ideal of men; zeal for the common good; to the business of killing human beings and destroying the results of their collective work.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), Clean Business

Life , Men , Money , War

“How to use my imagination so as to strengthen me instead of making me weak.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living

Imagination

“How to work so as to make work a pleasure.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living

Pleasure

“How to curb my selfishness and develop my altruism.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living

Selfishness

“How to make friends and keep them.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living

“You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you do not trust enough”

Frank Crane

As quoted in Business Education World, Vol. 15 (1935) p. 172.

“How to control my sex instinct so as to make it conduce my permanent happiness and not to disease, mental misery, and the wrecking of my career.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living

Disease , Sex , Happiness

“How to handle enemies and those who wrong or offend me.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living

“How to improve and toughen my will.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living

“Nobilities, indecencies, heroic impulses, cowardly ravings, good and bad, white and black — the mystery of mysteries, the central island of nescience in a sea of science, the dark spot in the lighted room of knowledge, the unknown quantity, the X in the universal problem.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

Knowledge , Problem , Light , Universe

“How to value my own self-esteem more than the praise of others.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living

“The fact that seems to underlie this exhortation is that we become what we think about.”

Frank Crane

Everyday Wisdom (1927)

Thinking , Motivational

“Thoughts are given us, not only to chew over for ourselves, but to communicate to others. And if we can find a man that is ready to receive them, and a suitable occasion, there is nothing more pleasurable than giving them.”

Frank Crane

Preface.
Everyday Wisdom (1927)

Pleasure , Communication

“How to find pleasure in common things.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living

Pleasure

“How to get joy out of nature.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living

Nature , Joy

“The human heart is a deep still pool; in it are fishes of gold and silver, darting playfully, and slow-heaving slimy monsters, and tarnished treasure hoards, the infinite animalcular life; but when you look down at it you see but your own reflected face.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

Life , Fish , Heart

“The human heart is a garden, wherein grow weeds of memory and blooms of hope, and the snow falls at last and covers all.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

Hope , Memory , Heart

“How to be a good fellow without being a fool.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living

Fools

“The human heart is the throne of God, the council-chamber of the devil, the dwelling of angels, the vile heath of witches' Sabbaths, the nursery of sweet children, the blood-spattered scene of nameless tragedies.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

God , Children , Angels , Heart

“How to get along with relatives and all those persons with whom I come in contact.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living

Personality

“The human heart is a roaring forge where night and day the smiths are busy fashioning swords and silver cups, mitres and engine-wheels, the tools of *labor, and the gauds of precedence.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

Fashion , Business , Heart , Night

“How to play fair.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living

“How to control my temper.”

Frank Crane

Four Minute Essays Vol. 7 (1919), A School for Living

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