Quotes by Clergymen - Page 3

Be good sweet maid and let who will be clever Do noble things not dream them all day long And so make life death and that vast forever One grand sweet song.
Charles Kingsley
Our ordinary and reasonable service to God may actually compete against our total surrender to Him.
Oswald Chambers
That cowardice is incorrigible which the love of power cannot overcome.
Charles Caleb Colton
A prayerless age will have but scant models of divine power. The age may be a better age than the past, but there is an infinite distance between the betterment of an age by the force of an advancing civilization and its betterment by the increase of holiness and Christlikeness by the energy of prayer.
E.M.Bounds
We are not built for mountains and dawns and artistic affinities; they are for moments of inspiration, that is all. We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff of life, and this is where we have to prove our mettle. A false Christianity takes us up on the mount and we want to stay there. But what about the devil-possessed world? Oh, let it go to hell! We are having a great time up here.
Oswald Chambers
Fear is a kind of bell or gong which rings the mind into quick life and avoidance upon the approach of danger. It is the soul's signal for rallying.
Henry Ward Beecher
Change of weather is the discourse of fools.
Thomas Fuller
The best measure of a spiritual life is not its ecstasies but its obedience.
Oswald Chambers
It usually takes 100 years to make a law and then after it's done its work it usually takes 100 years to be rid of it.
Henry Ward Beecher
The deadliest Pharisaism today is not hypocrisy, but unconscious unreality.
Oswald Chambers
Old foxes want no tutors.
Thomas Fuller
If man is man and God is God, to live without prayer is not merely an awful thing: it is an infinitely foolish thing.
Phillips Brooks
There is a vast world of work out there in this country, where at least 111 million people are employed in this country alone--many of whom are bored out of their minds. All day long. Not for nothing is their motto TGIF -- 'Thank God It's Friday.' They live for the weekends, when they can go do what they really want to do.
Richard N. Bolles
It is said that Mr. Gladstone could persuade most people of most things and himself of anything.
Dean William R. Inge
Faith is an assent of the mind and a consent of the heart consisting mainly of belief and trust.
E. T. Hiscox
Yes, I laugh at all mankind, and the imposition that they dare to practice when they talk of hearts. I laugh at human passions and human cares, vice and virtue, religion and impiety; they are all the result of petty localities, and artificial situation. One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the colorless and shriveled lip of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius. It silences in a second all the feeble sophistry of conventional life, and ascetical passion.
Charles Robert Maturin
Non-praying is lawlessness discord anarchy.
E.M.Bounds
Hope is one of the principal springs that keep mankind in motion.
Thomas Fuller
A day dawns quite like other days in it a single hour comes quite like other hours but in that day and in that hour the chance of a lifetime faces us.
Maltbie D. Babcock
We become side-tracked if we make physical health our aim and imagine that because we are children of God we shall always be perfectly well.
Oswald Chambers
All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
Henry Ward Beecher
God's "nothings" are His most positive answers. We have to stay on God and wait. Never try to help God to fulfill His word.
Oswald Chambers
In books I meet the dead as if they were alive,in books I see what is yet to come...All things decay and pass with time...all fame would fall victim to oblivionif God had not given mortal men the book to aid them.
Richard de Bury
The nations which have put mankind and posterity most in their debt have been small states - Israel Athens Florence Elizabethan England.
Dean William R. Inge
There is no such thing as white lies a lie is as black as a coalpit and twice as foul.
Henry Ward Beecher
Patience strengthens the spirit, sweetens the temper, stifles anger, extinguishes envy, subdues pride, bridles the tongue.
George Horne
.....listening means learning to hear someone's inner world and deepest feelings with far greater attention in order that we don't let our own assumptions get in the way. The dying may speak in images far more akin to dreamland than the world of everyday reality. In order to understand them we have to make adjustments to comprehend a poetic form of expression that is sometimes elusive but actually far more expressive than the world of facts.
Robert L. Wise
Inventiveness depends upon two habits of mind, which we can adopt and develop: attention andcuriosity.Attention means paying attention.....Curiosity means just that. Endlessly curious. Endlessly asking questions. Endlessly wanting to knowhow, and why?
Richard N. Bolles
Very strange is this quality of our human nature which decrees that unless we feel a future before us we do not live completely in the present.
Phillips Brooks
Nothing can be rightly known, if God be not known; nor is any study well managed, nor to any great purpose, if God is not studied. We know little of the creature, till we know it as it stands related to the Creator: single letters, and syllables uncomposed, are no better than nonsense. He who overlooketh him who is the 'Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending,' and seeth not him in all who is the All of all, doth see nothing at all. All creatures, as such, are broken syllables; they signify nothing as separated from God. Were they separated actually, they would cease to be, and the separation would be annhiliation; and when we separate them in our fancies, we make nothing of them to ourselves. It is one thing to know the creatures as Aristotle, and another thing to know them as a Christian. None but a Christian can read one line of his Physics so as to understand it rightly. It is a high and excellent study, and of greater use than many apprehend; but it is the smallest part of it that Aristotle can teach us.
Richard Baxter
Better to wear out than to rust out.
Bishop Cumberland
As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.
Oswald Chambers
Putting off an easy thing makes it hard. Putting off a hard thing makes it impossible.
George Claude Lorimer
God does not exist to answer our prayers but by our prayers we come to discern the mind of God.
Oswald Chambers
Intercessory prayer for one who is sinning prevails. God says so! The will of the man prayed for does not come into question at all he is connected with God by prayer and prayer on the basis of the Redemption sets the connection working and God gives life.
Oswald Chambers
That which others hear or read of, I felt and practised myself; they get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing.
Robert Burton
That very breath wherewith they utter their complaints is a blessing and a fundamental one too for if God would withdraw that they were incapable of whatsoever else either have or desire.
Richard Allestree
The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so.
William Ralph Inge
We have to pray with our eyes on God not on the difficulties.
Oswald Chambers
Men spend their lives in anticipation in determining to be vastly happy at some period when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other-it is our own.... We may lay in a stock of pleasures as we would lay in a stock of wine but if we defer the tasting of them too long we shall find that both are soured by age.
Charles Caleb Colton
Don't forget to pray today because God did not forget to wake you up this morning.
Oswald Chambers
A door that seems to stand open must be of a man's size or it is not the door that providence means for him.
Henry Ward Beecher
I think Christians fail so often to get answers to their prayers because they do not wait long enough on God. They just drop down and say a few words and then jump up and forget it and expect God to answer them. Such praying always reminds me of the small boy ringing his neighbor's door-bell and then running away as fast as he can go.
E.M.Bounds
It is by no haphazard chance that in every age men have risen early to pray. The first thing that marks decline in spiritual life is our relationship to the early morning.
Oswald Chambers
When a poor soul is somewhat awakened by the terrors of the Lord, then the poor creature, being born under the covenant of works, flies directly to a covenant of works again. And as Adam and Eve hid themselves… and sewed fig leaves… so the poor sinner, when awakened, flies to his duties and to his performances, to hide himself from God, and goes to patch up a righteousness of his own. Says he, I will be mighty good now–I will reform–I will do all I can; and then certainly Jesus Christ will have mercy on me.
George Whitefield
Ye cannot live for yourselves; a thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men, and along those fibres, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and return to you as effects.
Henry Melvill
A helping word to one in trouble is often like a switch on a railroad track ... an inch between wreck and smooth rolling prosperity.
Henry Ward Beecher
Cheat me in the price but not in the goods.
Thomas Fuller
Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
Henry Ward Beecher
May your criminal enjoyments vanish as a shadow! may your ill-gotten wealth leave you without a resource; and may you yourself remain alone and deserted, to learn the vanity of these things, which now divert you from better pursuits!
Antoine François Prévost d'Exiles
Men and women are needed whose prayers will give to the world the utmost power of God; who will make His promises to blossom with rich and full results. God is waiting to hear us and challenges us to bring Him to do this thing by our praying. He is asking us, to-day, as He did His ancient Israel, to prove Him now herewith." Behind God's Word is God Himself, and we read: "Thus saith the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, his Maker: Ask of me of things to come and concerning my sons, and concerning the work of my hands, command ye me." As though God places Himself in the hands and at the disposal of His people who pray - as indeed He does. The dominant element of all praying is faith, that is conspicuous, cardinal and emphatic. Without such faith it is impossible to please God, and equally impossible to pray.
E.M.Bounds
No heart thrives without much secret converse with God and nothing will make amends for the want of it.
John Berridge
A fox should not be of the jury at a goose's trial.
Thomas Fuller
Gratitude is a vaccine, an antitoxin, and an antiseptic.
John Henry Jowett
Our Lord never referred to unanswered prayer he taught that prayers are always answered. He ever implied that prayers were answered rightly because of the Heavenly Father's wisdom.
Oswald Chambers
The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl vigilant in darkness and blind to light mousing for vermin and never seeing noble game. The cynic puts all human actions into two classes - openly bad and secretly bad.
Henry Ward Beecher
He that planteth a tree is a servant of God, he provideth a kindness for many generations, and faces that he hath not seen shall bless him.
Henry Van Dyke
To say that 'prayer changes things' is not as close to the truth as saying, 'prayer changes me and then I change things.' God has established things so that prayer, on the basis of redemption, changes the way a person looks at things.
Oswald Chambers
Men's best successes come after their disappointments.
Henry Ward Beecher
The Holy Spirit is not in a hurry. Character is the produce of a lifetime.
John Stott