“You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips.”
“The sight of a drunkard is a better sermon against that vice than the best that was ever preached on that subject.”
The Lady's New Year's Gift: or Advice to a Daughter (1688)
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George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax 65
English politician 1633–1695Related quotes
Investigations have failed to confirm this in Emerson's writings (John H. Lienhard. "A better moustrap" http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1163.htm, Engines of our Ingenuity). Also reported as a misattribution in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 25. Note that Emerson did say, as noted above, "I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods".
Misattributed
“The first sermon that Christ preached, indeed, the first word of his sermon was 'Repent.”
The Doctrine of Repentance (1668)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 476.
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 373.
“Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.”
Source: Jayber Crow
Address to the Springfield Washingtonian Temperance Society (22 February 1842), quoted at greater length in John Carroll Power (1889) Abraham Lincoln: His Life, Public Services, Death and Funeral Cortege
1840s