Spiritual Quotes: Companions For The Soul

The bees, I mean-that nation of chemists to whom Nature has communicated the rare and valuable secret of enriching themselves without impoverishing others, who extract the most delicious syrup from every fragrant herb without wounding its substance or diminishing its odors. I take the more notice of these ingenious operators because I would make them my pattern.

- Rev. James Hervey -

St. Paul sees the members of the Christian Church so possessed by the Spirit of Christ, and so dedicated to the fulfillment of His purpose, that they are one person in Christ; and he looks forward to the time when all races and all individuals will have brought in their own contribution…one man in Christ Jesus grown to the fullness of His stature.

- William Temple -

….be merciful to me, O my God, for I am about to venture into the horrors of the deep. There shall I see Your wonders, but let me not see Your wrath. There shall I look into hell, but let me not fall into the jaws of fear and desperation. Preserve me, O Lord, in the womb of the ship …just as You saved Jonah in the belly of the whale.

- Thomas Dekker -

We believe in one God, the only and true God, the Father all-sovereign, creator and artificer of all things. And in the one only-begotten Son of God, who, before conceivable time and before all comprehensible being, was begotten impassibly from God.

- The “Dated Creed” -

Note that when Christ performed the miracle of changing water into wine, he did not say from the very first, “Let there be wine”….It is impossible to explain what He did in a literal sense, but a reason may be given in terms of spiritual understanding: the Holy Spirit does not provide spiritual understanding unless man provide the jar…. Then does God change the water of literal understanding into the wine of the spiritual.

- Giovanni Di Fedanza -

… the enemy suggested, “This cannot be faith, for where is your joy?” Then was taught that peace and victory over sin are essential to faith in the Captain of your salvation but that, as to the transports of joy that usually attend the beginning of it, especially in those who have mourned deeply, “God sometimes gives, sometimes withholds them, according to the counsels of His Will.”

- John Wesley -

The crosses that we make for ourselves by over anxiety as to the future are not Heaven-sent crosses. We tempt God by our false wisdom, seeking to forestall His arrangements and struggling to supplement His Providence by our own provisions… The future is not ours; we may never have a future; or, if it comes, it may be wholly different than all we foresaw.

- Francois Fenelon -

In the face of that journey which lies before us all, no one is so wise as to have no need to ponder, before setting out from here, how the soul will be judged after death-whether for good or whether for evil.

- The Venerable Bede -

The times which we are fallen into do loudly call for our supplication to that God in whose hands are all our times. All the whole tribe of thinking [people] that have any understanding of the times, do know this: that of all the things that we ought now to do, there is nothing more seasonable than unfeigned prayer to the Lord…. Pray, pray,pray. Never more need than now.

- Cotton Mather -

It is from your prison, from your chains, from the dungeon, from the darkness, that he calls you, and yet will you not come?… His yoke is easy, his laws are liberty, his services is freedom, and whatever prejudice you may have against his ways, if God may be believed, you shall find them all pleasure and peace.

- Joseph Alleine -

O Lord, who is the very bright sun of the world, ever rising, never falling, who, your wholesome look engenders, preserves, nourishes, and makes joyful all things that are in heaven and earth: shine favorably, I beseech You, on my spirit.

- The Primer -

[Sunday] is … a day of rest, not of pleasures. It frees us from bodily labors, but it should the more intend the exercise of the mind. God blessed the day and sanctified it; they must go together. If we would have it be happy, we must make it holy.

- Nicholas Ferrar -

Many members of a family may bear the same name, may share the same blood, may sit and eat at the same table, and yet may have no more vital union than a handful of marbles in a boy’s pocket. But let the spirit of a common love dwell in all their hearts and there is a family bound together in glorious union.

- John Henry Jowett -

Your citizenship is in Heaven. Not shall be in Heaven, but is, in virtue of that victory of your Lord…. The world’s claim on your allegiance is disowned and cast out…. Christ, your King, has come to you from Heaven and has made you its citizen. The real question is, can you, having your citizenship in Heaven, turn again to the beggarly elements from which He has set you free?

- J. Baldwin Brown -

Indeed, all that you meet with, till you meet Him face to face, should bring you into more experience of His perfect salvation and of His free love to bestow it on such as you-by which means you would be growing daily in the excellency of the knowledge of your Lord and would be more conformed to His and example.

- William Romaine -

For a man to have his conscience against him in the day of battle is very sad thing. It frightens a man far more than the enemy.

- Samuel Nowell -

Oh may we meet! For me, I have nothing; I am nothing. But One there is, who was and is all that the mind of saint or angel can conceive of glory and happiness, and He is mine and I am most blessed. Lengthen on, you shadows, until all is shadow on these orbs of flesh. Then, oh then, “My captive soul set free from cloggish earth [will] grasp the deity.”

- Isabella Graham -

Rejoice, then, beloved, in the hope of your future inheritance in your heavenly home, to all adversities that assail your heart or body, oppose the shield of faith and patience, so that with the aid of Christ, your spouse, in a happy old age you may complete for the glory of God the tower of the spirit which you began to build in the goodly days of your youth.

- St. Boniface -

For let us examine who they are that are honorable indeed. It is not the righteous? Is it not the holy? Is it not the humble-hearted, the meek spirited? And are not such as those that ought to he honored among Christians? [And] of these, may there not be poor men, laborers, silly fishermen?

- Robert Barclay -

Oh, that old rugged cross so despised by the world, has a wondrous attraction for me; for the dear Lamb of God left his glory above, to bear it to dark Calvary.

- George Bennard -

Within a mirror large and bright
I thought I caught a sight
Of that fair heavenly city….
And truly, I could see,
It excelled in beauty
All others by comparison;
For God himself was its mason….

- Guillaume De Deguileville -

That I might bless the Lord who conserves all heaven with its countless bright orders, land, stand, and flood…. At times kneeling to Beloved Heaven; at times at psalm singing… At times at work without compulsion; this would be delightful.

- St. Columba -

What! A variety of religious creeds pleasing to God! Will anyone hold that God delights in lies? Yet he must delight in lies if he delights in a variety of beliefs. There can be but one true belief; all the rest must be false…. And yet there are men who believe that a variety of faith is pleasing to the God of truth.

- William Cobbett -

Even as the loving wife, hastening to the hospital to see her husband who had been wounded…when she saw his misshapen, bandaged face, involuntarily recoiled; so would our soul shrink back from ourselves if we were to see in clearness our own being soiled by sin and enwounded by grace…. He will only let you see yourself when the last trace of sin is gone and the last bandage has been removed.

- Abraham Kuyper -

My father used all his endeavors to dissuade me [from the Christian faith]; i resolutely answered, “Father, I am a Christian.” He instantly threw himself upon me in a rage, as if to tear out my eyes, and used the most injurious language. A few day afterward, we all received the holy baptism and were led to the public prison.

- St. Perpetua -

…from the pendulum of a clock we come to a wheel, and from that wheel to another, and finally to the wit of the clock maker who, by his cunning, has so ordered them…yet he himself vanished not. It remains then that of all these movings, we must imagine one unmovable; and of all these so constant diversities, one always like itself; and of all these bodies, one Spirit.

- Philippe De Mornay -

What language can attain to the marvels of the Creator? What ear could understand them? And what time would be sufficient to relate them? Let us say, then, with prophet, “O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have created them all.”

- St. Basil -

Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in. Who is the King of Glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle…. Who is the King of Glory? The Lord of Hosts, he is the King of Glory.

- George Frederick Handel -

As the sparks know no motion but that of flying upwards, whether it be the darkness of the night or in the night or in the light of the day, so the spirit of love is always on the same course. It knows no difference of time, place, or persons….for the spirit of love, wherever it is, is its own blessing and happiness, because it is the truth and reality of God in the soul.

- William Law -

One of the disconcerting facts about the spiritual life is that God takes you at your word. Sooner or later one is given a chance to prove his love….

- Dorothy Day -

Let us shut our eyes to that which God hides from us in the hidden depths of His Wisdom. Let us worship without seeing; let us be silent and lie still.

- Francois Fenelon -

O Love, can it be that you have called me with so great a love, and made me to know in one instant that which worlds cannot express?

- Catherine Of Genoa -

What, my dear friends, is the message of the Lord’s supper?… That sacrament proclaims that all alike are brothers of each other, because they are all alike brothers of one-and he the son of a village maiden…that all are equally debtors-all equally in need of the pardon which he has brought for them-and that pardon is equally ready and free to all of them.

- Charles Kingsley -

O yes! There can be found in everyone of us more of the mind that was in Christ, his meekness, his gentleness, his patience, his courage, his self-denying, self-sacrificing spirit. Above all, and over all, his unspotted holiness; maintained, fortified, and rendered invulnerable by his incorruptible integrity towards God and towards men!

- Daniel A. Payne -

“Of all small things made by God,” answered Hilary, “most excellent is the face of man and woman; for among all the faces of the children of Adam, not one has ever been wholly like any other; and there, is smallest space, God has placed all the senses of the body, and it is in the face that we see, as in a glass darkly, all that can be seen of the invisible soul within.”

- William Canton -

The fruit of my labors is not my own: for I am preparing the way for the achievements of another. Nor are my failures my own. They may springs from the failure of another, but they are also compensated for by another’s achievement.

- Thomas Merton -

And in the lives of Saints we frequently read that the most saintly have been those whose wit and keen enjoyment of the humorous was the greatest…. Despair dares not face one who is a wag, for it knows well that he is likely as not to burst out into laughter straight in his face.

- Henry Austin Adams -

“The Lord is my strength” to do on. he gives us power to tread the dead level, to walk the long lane that seems never to have a turning, to go through those long reaches of life that afford no pleasant surprise, and that depress the spirits in the sameness of a terrible drudgery.

- Lettie B. Cowman -

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free, ‘Tis the gift to come down where in the place just right, ‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

- Elder Joseph Brackett -