No one who has come to true greatness has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to the people, and what God has given them he gives it for mankind.
The essence of that by which Jesus overcame the world was not suffering, but obedience. Yes, men may puzzle themselves and their hearers over the question where the power of the life of Jesus and the death of Jesus lay; but the soul of the Christian always knows that it lay in the obedience of Christ. He was determined at every sacrifice to do His Father's will. Let us remember that; and the power of Christ's sacrifice may enter into us, and some little share of the redemption of the world may come through us, as the great work came through Him.
Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or a realization of our duty and privilege as one of God's children.
Be patient and understanding. Life is too short to be vengeful or malicious.
I would know any man as a Christian, would rejoice to know any man as a Christian, whom Jesus would recognize as a Christian; and Jesus Christ, I am sure, in these old days recognized His followers even if they came after Him with the blindest sight, with the most imperfect recognition and acknowledgment of what He was and of what He could do.
Newton's great generalization, which he called the "third law of motion," was that "Action and reaction are always equal to each other;" and that law has been one of the most pregnant of all truths about the mystery of force;--one of the brightest windows through which modern eyes have looked into the world of Nature.
The ideal life is in our blood and never will be still.
Joy in one's work is the consummate tool.
Christianity helps us face the music even when we don't like the tune.
The truest help we can render an afflicted man is not to take his burden from him, but to call out his best energy, that he may be able to bear the burden.
The trouble is that I'm in a hurry, but God isn't.
Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.
The earth has grown old with its burden of care, but at Christmas it always is young, the heart of the jewel burns lustrous and fair, and its soul full of music breaks the air, when the song of angels is sung.
There is a necessary limit to our achievement, but none to our attempt.
Do not dare to live without some clear intention toward which your living shall be bent. Mean to be something with all your might.
Greatness is not so much a certain size as a certain quality in your life.
Pray the largest prayers. You cannot think a prayer so large that God, in answering it, will not wish you had made it larger. Pray not for crutches but for wings.
We anticipate a time when the love of truth shall have come up to our love of liberty, and men shall be cordially tolerant and earnest believers both at once.
Christ is the Word of God. It is not in certain texts written in the New Testament, valuable as they are; it is not in certain words which Jesus spoke, vast as is their preciousness; it is in the Word, which Jesus is, that the great manifestation of God is made.
A prayer in its simplest definition is merely a wish turned Godward.
O, do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks! Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God.
The great Easter truth is not that we are to live newly after death - that is not the great thing - but that...we are to, and may, live nobly now because we are to live forever.
If we could sweep intemperance out of the country, there would be hardly poverty enough left to
Pray the largest prayers.pray not for crutches but for wings.
There is no life so humble that, if it be true and genuinely human and obedient to God, it may not hope to shed some of His light. There is no life so meager that the greatest and wisest of us can afford to despise it. We cannot know at what moment it may flash forth with the life of God.
Stand up, on this Thanksgiving Day, stand upon your feet. Believe in man. Soberly and with clear eyes, believe in your own time and place. There is not, and there never has been a better time, or a better place to live in.
Where charity stands watching and faith holds wide the door the dark night wakes - the glory breaks, Christmas comes once more.
The faith which you keep must be a faith that demands obedience, and you can keep it only by obeying it.
Those who help a child help humanity with an immediateness which no other help given to human creature in any other stage of human life can possibly give again.
We never become truly spiritual by sitting down and wishing to become so. You must undertake something so great that you cannot accomplish it unaided.
O, do not pray for easy lives.
For the Christ-child who comes is the Master of all; No palace too great, no cottage too small.
Up and down our lives obedient Walk, dear Christ, with footsteps radiant, Till those garden lives shall be Fair with duties done for Thee; And our thankful spirits say, "Christ arose on Easter Day."
The earth has grown old with its burden of care, But at Christmas it always is young.
No one ever fell under the burden of the day; it is only when the burden of tomorrow is added that the load becomes unbearable.
To whatever world He carries our souls when they shall pass out of these imprisoning bodies, in those worlds these souls of ours shall find themselves part of the same great temple; for it belongs not to this earth alone.
Never be afraid to bring the transcendent mysteries of our faith, Christ's life and death and resurrection, to the help of the humblest and commonest of human wants.
Everything keeps its best nature only by being put to its best use.
Go and try to save a soul, and you will see how well it is worth saving, how capable it is of the most complete salvation. Not by pondering about it, nor by talking of it, but by saving it, you learn its preciousness.
Charity should begin at home, but should not stay there.
Distrust your religion unless it is cheerful, unless it turns every act and deed to music and exults in attempts to catch the harmony of the new life.
The form of godliness may exist with secret and with open wickedness, but the power of godliness cannot.
Call your opinions your creed, and you will change it every week. Make your creed simply and broadly out of the revelation of God, and you may keep it to the end.
Get up; repent. Come to God. Get the pattern of your life from Him, and then go about your work and be yourself.
The danger is that we may fail to perceive life's greatest meaning, fall short of its highest good, miss its deepest and most abiding happiness, be unable to render the most needed service, be unconscious of life ablaze with the light of the Presence of God - and be content to have it so - that is the danger. That some day we may wake up and find that always we have been busy with the husks and trappings of life - and have really missed life itself.
Feed on Christ, and then go and live your life, and it is Christ in you that lives your life, that helps the poor, that tells the truth, that fights the battle, and that wins the crown.
Set yourself earnestly to see what you are made to do, and then set yourself earnestly to do it.
Genius, by its very intensity, decrees a special path of fire for its vivid power.
There are no times in life when opportunity, the chance to be and do, gathers so richly about the soul as when it has to suffer. Then everything depends on whether the man turns to the lower or the higher helps. If he resorts to mere expedients and tricks the opportunity is lost. He comes out harder, poorer, smaller for his pain. But, if he turns to God, the hour of suffering is the turning hour of his life.
The Bible is like a telescope. If a man looks through his telescope, then he sees worlds beyond; but if he looks at his telescope, then he does not see anything but that. The Bible is a thing to be looked through, to see that which is beyond; but most people only look at it; and so they see only the dead letter.
As you emphasize your life, you must localize and define it... you cannot do everything.
When you discover you've been leading only half a life, the other half is going to haunt you until you develop it.
The elements which determine the make of any particular sermon are three; the preacher, the material, and the audience; just as the character of any battle is determined by three elements; the gun (including the gunner), the ammunition, and the fortress against which the attack is made.
No man ever yet thought whether he was preaching well without weakening his sermon.
To find his place and fill it is success for a man.
If man is man and God is God, to live without prayer is not merely an awful thing: it is an infinitely foolish thing.
It never frightened a Puritan when you bade him stand still and listen to the speech of God. His closet and his church were full of the reverberations of the awful, gracious, beautiful voice for which he listened.
Devotion is like the candle which Michael Angelo used to take in his pasteboard cap, so as not to throw his shadow upon the work in which he was engaged.
Obedience completes itself in understanding.
A man who lives right, and is right, has more power in his silence than another has by his words.
No man dares to condemn the Christian faith today, because the Christian faith has not been tried. Not until men get rid of the thought that it is a poor machine, an expedient for saving them from suffering and pain; not until they get the grand idea of it as the great power of God present in and through the lives of men; not until then does Christianity enter upon its true trial and become ready to show what it can do.
Think of life as a voyage. The truest liver of the truest life is like a voyager who, as he sails, is not indifferent to all the beauty of the sea around him.
Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is the child of God.
Tomb, thou shalt not hold Him longer; Death is strong, but Life is stronger; Stronger than the dark, the light; Stronger than the wrong, the right; Faith and Hope triumphant say Christ will rise on Easter Day.
Christmas day is a day of joy and charity. May God make you very rich in both.
We are haunted by an ideal life, and it is because we have within us the beginning and the possibility of it.
The man who goes through life with an uncertain doctrine not knowing what he believes, what a poor, powerless creature he is! He goes around through the world as a man goes down through the street with a poor, wounded arm, forever dodging people be meets on the street for fear they may touch him.
He who thinks that he is being released from the work, and not set free in order that he may accomplish that work, mistakes the Christ from whom the freedom comes, mistakes the condition into which his soul is invited.
The man, who has begun to live more seriously within, begins to live more simply without.
We may say that on the first Good Friday afternoon was completed that great act by which light conquered darkness and goodness conquered sin. That is the wonder of our Saviour's crucifixion. There have been victories all over the world, but wherever we look for the victor we expect to find him with his heel upon the neck of the vanquished. The wonder of Good Friday is that the victor lies vanquished by the vanquished one. We have to look deeper into the very heart and essence of things before we can see how real the victory is that thus hides itself under the guise of defeat.
Everywhere the flower of obedience is intelligence. Obey a man with cordial loyalty and you will understand him.
Wherever souls are being tried and ripened, in whatever commonplace and homely way, there God is hewing out the pillars for His temple.
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.
You may look through the streets of heaven, asking each how they came to b there, and you will look in vain everywhere for a person who is morally and spiritually strong, whose strength did not come to him in struggle. There is no exception anywhere. Every true strength is gained in struggle.
Let us give thanks to God upon Thanksgiving Day. Nature is beautiful and fellowmen are dear, and duty is close beside us, and God is over us and in us. We want to trust Him with a fuller trust, and so at last to come to that high life where we shall "be careful for nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let our request be made known unto God"; for that, and that alone, is peace.
Nothing lies beyond the reach of prayer except that which lies outside the will of God.
Life is too short to nurse one's misery. Hurry across the lowlands so that you may spend more time on the mountain tops.
Never fear to bring the sublimest motive to the smallest duty, and the most infinite comfort to the smallest trouble.
It is not pride when the beech-tree refuses to copy the oak. He knows his limitations. The only chance of any healthy life for him is to be as full a beech-tree as he can.
Greatness after all, in spite of its name, appears to be not so much a certain size as a certain quality in human lives. It may be present in lives whose range is very small.
Pray for and work for fullness of life above every thing; full red blood in the body; full honesty and truth in the mind; and the fullness of a grateful love for the Saviour in your heart.
The place where two friends first met is sacred to them all through their friendship, all the more sacred as their friendship deepens and grows old.
I do not pray for a lighter load, but for a stronger back.
Pray for powers equal to your tasks.
Bear with the faults of others as you would have them bear with yours.
Faith says not, 'I see that it is good for me, so God must have sent it,' but, 'God sent it, and so it must be good for me.' Faith, walking in the dark with God, only prays Him to clasp its hand more closely.
Let every man and woman count himself immortal. Let him catch the revelation of Jesus in his resurrection. Let him say not merely, "Christ is risen," but "I shall rise."
The lives of men who have been always growing are strewed along their whole course with the things they have learned to do without.
Jesus Christ, the condescension of divinity, and the exaltation of humanity.
Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Prayer is not conquering God's reluctance, but taking hold of God's willingness.
Every sermon must have a solid rest in Scripture, and the pointedness which comes of a clear subject, and the conviction which belongs to well-thought argument, and the warmth that proceeds from earnest appeal.
The more man becomes irradiated with Divinity, the more, not the less, truly he is man.
Be such a man, and live such a life, that if every man were such as you, and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God's Paradise.
Let us beware of losing our enthusiasms. Let us ever glory in something, and strive to retain our admiration for all that would ennoble, and our interest in all that would enrich and beautify our life.
Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.
It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you.
To say 'well done'to any bit of good work is to take hold of the powers which have made the effort and strengthen them beyond our knowledge.
We may say that on the first Good Friday afternoon was completed that great act by which light conquered darkness and goodness conquered sin. That is the wonder of our Saviour's crucifixion.
It is almost as presumptuous to think you can do nothing as to think you can do everything.
O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie! Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.
The true way to be humble is not to stoop until you are smaller than yourself, but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that will show you what the real smallness of your greatness is.
The glory of the star, the glory of the sun - we must not lose either in the other. We must not be so full of the hope of heaven that we cannot do our work on the earth; we must not be so lost in the work of the earth that we shall not be inspired by the hope of heaven.
Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks.
Heaven does not make holiness, but holiness makes heaven.
Only the soul that with an overwhelming impulse and a perfect trust gives itself up forever to the life of other men, finds the delight and peace which such complete self-surrender has to give.
Anger is self-immolation.
It is God's world still. It has been given to man not absolutely, but in trust, that man may work out in it the will of God; given-may we not say?-just as a father gives a child a corner of his great garden, and says, "There, that is yours; now cultivate it."
Call your opinions your creed, and you will change it every week.
We do not want to lose our grief, because our grief is bound up with our love and we could not cease to mourn without being robbed of our affections.
To believe in the God over us and around us and not in the God within us - that would be a powerless and fruitless faith.
Heaven is not to sweep our truths away, but only to turn them till we see their glory, to open them till we see their truth, and to unveil our eyes till for the first time we shall really see them.
Death is strong, but Life is stronger.
So shall we join the disciples of our Lord, keeping faith in Him in spite of the crucifixion, and making ready, by our loyalty to Him in the days of His darkness, for the time when we shall enter into His triumph in the days of His light.
The solution to sin is not to impose an ever-stricter code of behavior. It is to know God.
The best advisers, helpers and friends, always are not those who tell us how to act in special cases, but who give us, out of themselves, the ardent spirit and desire to act right, and leave us then, even through many blunders, to find out what our own form of right action is.
You must learn, you must let God teach you, that the only way to get rid of your past is to make a future out of it. God will waste nothing.
Character - Some day, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now, in these quiet weeks. Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long-continued process.
There are two ways of defending a castle; one by shutting yourself up in it, and guarding every loop-hole; the other by making it an open centre of operations from which all the surrounding country may be subdued. Is not the last the truest safety?
How silently, how silently The wonderous gift is given! So God imparts to human hearts The blessings of his heaven. No ear may hear his coming, But in this world of sin, Where meek souls will receive him still, The dear Christ enters in.
It is good for us to think that no grace or blessing is truly ours till we are aware that God has blessed some one else with it through us.
Preaching is truth through personality.
Be courageous. Be independent. Only remember where the true courage and independence come from.
Happiness is the natural flower of duty.
It does not take great men to do great things; it only takes consecrated men.
Society does not exist for itself, but for the individual; and man goes into it, not to lose, but to find himself.
