65 quotes
It is more true to say that our opinions depend upon our lives and habits than to say that our lives depend upon our opinions, which is only now and then true.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)
Earth has not a spectacle more glorious or more fair to show than this — love tolerating intolerance; charity covering, as with a vail, even the sin of the lack of charity.
This is the ministry and its work — not to drill hearts and minds and consciences into right forms of thought and mental postures, but to guide to the living God who speaks.
There is no cure for ossification of the heart. Oh, that miserable state, when to the jaundiced eye all good transforms itself into evil, and the very instruments of health become the poison of disease.
He who lives to God rests in his Redeemer's love, and is trying to get rid of his old nature — to him every sorrow, every bereavement, every pain, will come charged with blessings, and death itself will be no longer the " king of terrors," but the messenger of grace.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)
This is the secret of Christ's kingship— "He became obedient — wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him." And this is the secret of all obedience and all command. Obedience to a law above you subjugates minds to you who never would have yielded to mere will.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)
In God's world, for those who are in earnest there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain.
Sow the seeds of life — humbleness, pure-heartedness, love; and in the long eternity which lies before the soul, every minutest grain will come up again with an increase of thirty, sixty, or a hundred fold.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)
Simpler manners, purer lives; more self-denial; more earnest sympathy with the classes that lie below us, nothing short of that can lay the foundations of the Christianity which is to be hereafter, deep and broad.
There are few signs in a soul's state more alarming than that of religious indifference, that is, the spirit of thinking all religions equally true— the real meaning of which is, that all religions are equally false.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)
You cannot undo your acts. If you have depraved another's will, and injured another's soul, it may be in the grace of God that hereafter you will be personally accepted, and the consequence of your guilt inwardly done away; but your penitence cannot undo the evil you have done. The forgiveness of God — the blood of Christ itself — does not undo the past.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)
Tell men that God is love; that right is right, and wrong, wrong; let them cease to admire philanthropy, and begin to love men; cease to pant for heaven, and begin to love God; then the spirit of liberty begins.
To believe is to be happy; to doubt is to be wretched. To believe is to be strong. Doubt cramps energy. Belief is power. Only so far as a man believes strongly, mightily, can he act cheerfully, or do any thing that is worth the doing.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)
A heart renewed — a loving heart — a penitent and humble heart — a heart broken and contrite, purified by love — that and only that is the rest of men. Spotlessness may do for angels, repentance unto life is the highest that belongs to man.
Learn the new commandment of the Son of God. Not to love merely, but to love as He loved. Go forth in this spirit to your life-duties; go forth, — children of the cross, to carry every thing before you, and win victories for God by the conquering power of a love like His.
Unworldliness is this — to hold things from God in the perpetual conviction that they will not last; to have the world, and not let the world have us; to be the world's masters, and not the world's slaves.
Law, meaning obedience to a holy God, passes by a natural transition into the gospel; that is, reverential duty to a person, to the obedience of love at last, which obeys, because the beau- tifulness of obedience is perceived.
Humility is that simple, inner life of real greatness, which is indifferent to magnificence, and, surrounded by it all, lives far away in the distant country of a Father's home, with the cross borne silently and self-sacrificingly in the heart of hearts.
Every unfulfilled aspiration of humanity in the past; all partial representation of perfect character; all sacrifices, nay, even those of idolatry, point to the fulfillment of what we want, the answer to every longing — the type of perfect humanity, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)
Life, like war, is a series of mistakes; and he is not the best Christian nor the best general who makes the fewest false steps. Poor mediocrity may secure that; but he is the best who wins the most splendid victories by the retrieval of mistakes. Forget mistakes; organize victory out of mistakes.
Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)