Frederick William Quotes & Sayings

The Divine wisdom has given us prayer, not as a means whereby to obtain the good things of earth, but as a means whereby we learn to do without them; not as a means whereby we escape evil, but as a means whereby we become strong to meet it. — Frederick William Robertson

God's highest gifts
talent, beauty, feeling, imagination, power
they carry with them the possibility of the highest heaven and the lowest hell. Be sure that it is by that which is highest in you that you may be lost. — Frederick William Robertson

The world is growing old;Who would not be at rest and freeWhere love is never cold? — Frederick William Faber

The man whom society will not forgive nor restore is driven into recklessness. — Frederick William Robertson

My recovery, though slower than hoped for, is nevertheless assured. — Frederick William Borden

There is a grand fearlessness in faith. He who in his heart of hearts reverences the good, the true, the holy
that is, reverences God
does not tremble at the apparent success of attacks upon the outworks of faith. They may shake those who rest on those outworks
they do not move him whose soul reposes on the truth itself. He needs no prop or crutches to support his faith. Founded on a Rock, Faith can afford to gaze undismayed at the approaches of Infidelity. — Frederick William Robertson

Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path. I shall be a litterateur, at least, all my life; nor would I abandon the hopes which still lead me on for all the gold in California.
EDGAR ALLAN POE TO FREDERICK WILLIAM THOMAS
FEBRUARY 14, 1849 — Andrew Barger

Only in the sacredness of inward silence does the soul truly meet the secret, hiding God. The strength of resolve, which afterward shapes life, and mixes itself with action, is the fruit of those sacred, solitary moments. There is a divine depth in silence. We meet God alone. — Frederick William Robertson

In these two things the greatness of man consists, to have God dwelling in us as to impart His character to us, and to have Him dwelling in us, that we recognize His presence, and know that we are His, and He is ours. The one is salvation; the other, the assurance of it. — Frederick William Robertson

This is the true liberty of Christ, when a free man binds himself in love to duty. Not in shrinking from our distasteful occupations, but in fulfilling them, do we realize our high origin. — Frederick William Robertson

On the night of the 1st of September we observed for the first time signs of the natives being in the neighbourhood. Fires were seen on the low land near Cape Frederick Henry, and at daylight we saw the natives with our glasses. — William Bligh

The buried talent is the sunken rock on which most lives strike and founder. — Frederick William Faber

By experience; by a sense of human frailty; by a perception of "the soul of goodness in things evil;" by a cheerful trust in human nature; by a strong sense of God's love; by long and disciplined realization of the atoning love of Christ; only thus can we get a free, manly, large, princely spirit of forgiveness. — Frederick William Robertson

This world is given as the prize for the men in earnest; and that which is true of this world, is truer still of the world to come. — Frederick William Robertson

It is not by change of circumstances, but by fitting our spirits to the circumstances in which God has placed us, that we can be reconciled to life and duty. — Frederick William Robertson

On earth we have nothing to do with success or results, but only with being true to God, and for God. Defeat in doing right is nevertheless victory. — Frederick William Robertson

Kind words are the music of the world. They have a power which seems to be beyond natural causes, as if they were some angel's song, which had lost its way and come on Earth, and sang on undyingly, smiting the hearts of men with sweetest wounds, and putting for the while an angel's nature into us. — Frederick William Faber

For right is right, since God is God and right the day must win. To doubt would be disloyalty, to falter would be sin. — Frederick William Faber

It has always seemed to me that a love of natural objects, and the depth, as well as exuberance and refinement of mind, produced by an intelligent delight in scenery, are elements of the first importance in the education of the young. — Frederick William Faber

The charm of the words of great men, those grand sayings which are recognized as true as soon as heard, is this, that you recognize them as wisdom which has passed across your own mind. You feel that they are your own thoughts come back to you ... — Frederick William Robertson

Religious controversy does only harm. It destroys humble inquiry after truth, and throws all the energies into an attempt to prove ourselves right-a spirit in which no man gets at truth. — Frederick William Robertson

It was necessary for the Son to disappear as an outward authority, in order that He might reappear as an inward principle of life. Our salvation is no longer God manifested in a Christ without us, but as a Christ within us, the hope of glory. — Frederick William Robertson

Truth is given, not to be contemplated, but to be done. Life is an action, not a thought. — Frederick William Robertson

Home is the one place in all this world where hearts are sure of each other. It is the place of confidence. It is the place where we tear off that mask of guarded and suspicious coldness which the world forces us to wear in self-defense, and where we pour out the unreserved communications of full and confiding hearts. It is the spot where expressions of tenderness gush out without any sensation of awkwardness and without any dread of ridicule. — Frederick William Robertson

There is a power in the soul, quite separate from the intellect, which sweeps away or recognizes the marvelous, by which God is felt. Faith stands serenely far above the reach of the atheism of science. It does not rest on the wonderful, but on the eternal wisdom and goodness of God. The revelation of the Son was to proclaim a Father, not a mystery. No science can sweep away the everlasting love which the heart feels, and which the intellect does not even pretend to judge or recognize. — Frederick William Robertson

It is more true to say that our opinions depend upon our lives and habits, than to say that our lives and habits depend on our opinions. — Frederick William Robertson

Cold hearts are not anxious enough to doubt. Men who love will have their misgivings at times; that is not the evil. But the evil is, when men go on in that languid, doubting way, content to doubt, proud of their doubts, morbidly glad to talk about them, liking the romantic gloom of twilight, without the manliness to say,
I must and will know the truth. That did not John. Brethren, John appealed to Christ. — Frederick William Robertson

What we are, and where we are, is God's providential arrangement ... and the manly and wise way is to look your disadvantages in the face, and see what can be made of them. — Frederick William Robertson

'T is said that absence conquers love; But oh believe it not! I've tried, alas! its power to prove, But thou art not forgot. — Frederick William Thomas

There is a two-fold solemnity which belongs to the dying hour-it is the winding up of life, and it is the commencement of eternity. — Frederick William Robertson

Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness. — Mark Twain

There are no disappointments to those whose wills are buried in the will of God. — Frederick William Faber

There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy, hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny. — Frederick William Robertson

The only revenge which is essentially Christian is that of retaliating by forgiveness. — Frederick William Robertson

Only what coronation is in an earthly way, baptism is in a heavenly way; God's authoritative declaration in material form of a spiritual reality. — Frederick William Robertson

Child of God, if you would have your thought of God something beyond a cold feeling of His presence, let faith appropriate Christ. — Frederick William Robertson

To grieve over sin is one thing, to repent is another. — Frederick William Robertson

Never permit failure to become a habit. — William Frederick Book

Remember that if the opportunities for great deeds should never come, the opportunities for good deeds are renewed day by day. The thing for us to long for is the goodness, not the glory. — Frederick William Faber

There is a great deal of self-will in the world, but very little genuine independence of character. — Frederick William Faber

Sorrow is a sanctuary as long as self is kept outside. [ ... ] let us not foster, embrace, rekindle and indulge our grief. For then our sorrow is a selfish and luxurious fiction, a ground in which the Holy Spirit will not dig. — Frederick William Faber

Time and pains will do anything. — Frederick William Robertson

No man ever progressed to greatness and goodness but through great mistakes. — Frederick William Robertson

Consequently, the value and importance of the monarchic idea cannot reside in the person of the monarch himself except if Heaven decides to lay the crown on the brow of the heroic genius like Frederick the Great or a wise character like William I. — Adolf Hitler

If the duties before us be not noble, let us ennoble them by doing them in a noble spirit; we become reconciled to life if we live in the spirit of Him who reconciled the life of God with the lowly duties of servants. — Frederick William Robertson

A man must drive his energy, not be driven by it. — William Frederick Book

We must wait for God, long, meekly, in the wind and wet, in the thunder and lightning, in the cold and the dark. Wait, and He will come. He never comes to those who do not wait. — Frederick William Faber

For children is there any happiness which is not also noise? — Frederick William Faber

God's justice and love are one. Infinite justice must be infinite love. Justice is but another sign of love. — Frederick William Robertson

There is a past which is gone forever, but there is a future which is still our own. — Frederick William Robertson

Christ within us, the hope of glory. — Frederick William Robertson

For when man comes to front the everlasting God, and look the splendor of His judgments in the face, personal integrity, the dream of spotlessness and innocence, vanishes into thin air: your decencies and your church-goings and your regularities and your attachment to a correct school and party, your gospel formulas of sound doctrine
what is all that, in front of the blaze of the wrath to come? — Frederick William Robertson

If you think that you can sin, and then by cries avert the consequences of sin, you insult God's character. — Frederick William Robertson

To believe is to be strong. Doubt cramps energy. Belief is power. — Frederick William Robertson

We must have passed through life unobservantly, if we have never perceived that a man is very much himself what he thinks of others. — Frederick William Faber

Writing over a century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner made the essential point. "Not the Constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people," he wrote, made American democracy possible.4 A half century later, the historian David Potter discovered a similar symbiosis between affluence and liberty. "A politics of abundance," he claimed, had created the American way of life, "a politics which smiled both on those who valued abundance as a means to safeguard freedom and those who valued freedom as an aid in securing abundance."5 William Appleman Williams, another historian, found an even tighter correlation. For Americans, he observed, "abundance was freedom and freedom was abundance."6 — Andrew J. Bacevich

Kindness is too often left uncultivated, because men do not sufficiently understand its value. Men may be charitable and not kind; merciful, yet not kind; self-denying and yet not kind. If they would add a little common kindness to their uncommon graces, they would convert ten where they now only abate the prejudice of one. — Frederick William Faber

The Christian life is not knowing or hearing, but doing. — Frederick William Robertson

Never does a man know the force that is in him till some mighty affliction or grief has humanized the soul. — Frederick William Robertson

To turn water into wine, and what is common into what is holy, is indeed the glory of Christianity. — Frederick William Robertson

Kindly words, sympathizing attentions, watchfulness against wounding men's sensitiveness-these cost very little, but they are priceless in their value. — Frederick William Robertson

Do you want to learn holiness with terrible struggles and sore affliction and the plague of much remaining evil? Then wait before you turn to God. — Frederick William Robertson

I read hard, or not at all; never skimming, never turning aside to merely inciting books; and Plato, Aristotle, Butler, Thucydides, Sterne, Jonathan Edwards, have passed like the iron atoms of the blood into my mental constitution. — Frederick William Robertson

We can exaggerate about many things; but we can never exaggerate our obligation to Jesus, or the compassionate abundance of the love of Jesus to us. All our lives long we might talk of Jesus, and yet we should never come to an end of the sweet things that might be said of Him. — Frederick William Faber

Exactness in little things is a wonderful source of cheerfulness. — Frederick William Faber

The rumor that the state of my health will necessitate my resignation is entirely unfounded. — Frederick William Borden

There is an inward state of the heart which makes truth credible the moment it is stated. It is credible to some men because of what they are. Love is credible to a loving heart; purity is credible to a pure mind; life is credible to a spirit in which life beats strongly it is incredible to other men. — Frederick William Robertson

Deep theology is the best fuel of devotion; it readily catches fire, and once kindled it burns long. — Frederick William Faber

Small things are best: Grief and unrest To rank and wealth are given; But little things On little wings Bear little souls to Heaven. — Frederick William Faber

The one who will be found in trial capable of great acts of love is ever the one who is always doing considerate small ones. — Frederick William Robertson

Only so far as a man believes strongly, mightily, can he act cheerfully, or do anything that is worth doing. — Frederick William Robertson

Every natural longing has its natural satisfaction. If we thirst, God has created liquids to gratify thirst. If we are susceptible of attachment, there are beings to gratify that love. If we thirst for life and love eternal, it is likely that there are an eternal life and an eternal love to satisfy that craving. — Frederick William Robertson

Women and God are the two rocks on which a man must either anchor or be wrecked. — Frederick William Robertson

Pray till prayer makes you forget your own wish, and leave it or merge it in God's will. — Frederick William Robertson

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. — Frederick William Robertson

False notions of liberty are strangely common. People talk of it as if it meant the liberty of doing whatever one likes - whereas the only liberty that a man, worthy of the name of man, ought to ask for, is, to have all restrictions, inward and outward, removed that prevent his doing what he ought. — Frederick William Robertson

You reap what you sow - not something else, but that. An act of love makes the soul more loving. A deed of humbleness deepens humbleness. The thing reaped is the very thing sown, multiplied a hundred fold. You have sown a seed of life, you reap life everlasting. — Frederick William Robertson

Life, like war, is a series of mistakes,he is the best who wins the most splendid victories by the retrieval of mistakes. Forget mistakes: organize victory out of mistakes. — Frederick William Robertson

And now because you are His child, live as a child of God; be redeemed from the life of evil, which is false to your nature, into the life of goodness, which is the truth of your being. Scorn all that is mean; hate all that is false; struggle with all that is impure Live the simple, lofty life which befits an heir of immortality. — Frederick William Robertson

Happiness is a great power of holiness. Thus, kind words, by their power of producing happiness, have also a power of producing holiness, and so of winning men to God. — Frederick William Faber

He in whose heart the law was, and who alone of all mankind was content to do it, His sacrifice alone can be the sacrifice all-sufficient in the Father's sight as the proper sacrifice of humanity; He who through the Eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, He alone can give the Spirit which enables us to present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. He is the only High-Priest of the universe. — Frederick William Robertson

However dark and profitless, however painful and weary, existence may have become, life is not done, and our Christian character is not won, so long as God has anything left for us to suffer, or anything left for us to do. — Frederick William Robertson

Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament is the queen of all devotions. It is the central devotion of the Church. All others gather round it, and group themselves there as satellites; for others celebrate his mysteries; this is Himself. It is the universal devotion. No one can be without it, in order to be a Christian. How can a man be a Christian who does not worship the living Presence of Christ? — Frederick William Faber

What the world calls virtue is a name and a dream without Christ. The foundation of all human excellence must be laid deep in the blood of the Redeemer's cross, and in the power of His resurrection. — Frederick William Robertson

The great fact is, that life is a service. The only question is, Whom will we serve? — Frederick William Faber

If I may use such a word when I am speaking of religious subjects, it is by voice and words that men 'mesmerize' each other. Hence it is that the world is converted by the voice of the preacher. — Frederick William Faber

Learn to adjust yourself to the conditions you have to endure, but make a point of trying to alter or correct conditions so that they are most favorable to you. — William Frederick Book

The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly. — Frederick William Robertson

William Lloyd Garrison was up there with Frederick Douglass being thrown off trains and going through what happened in the 1960s in 1840 in Boston. — Rand Paul

Adolf Hitler and his Brownshirts had surged to power. Now they held Germany by the throat. The Gestapo was rapidly creating a cruel and brutal police state that treated all but true Aryans like dogs and swine. That was certainly true for Jews like the Weisz family. In just the last few years, they and all of the Jewish families in Germany had been stripped of their citizenship and denied many of their most basic rights. Jacob's father, an esteemed professor of German history, had been summarily fired from his prestigious post at Frederick William University in Berlin. The Weisz family had been forced out of their beautiful, spacious home in the suburbs of the capital. They'd had a big red J stamped on their official papers and had been denied permission to leave the country. So they had left Berlin and made a new home in Siegen. — Joel C. Rosenberg

A life of prayer is a life whose litanies are ever fresh acts of self-devoting love. — Frederick William Robertson

The mistake we make is to look for a source of comfort in ourselves: self-contemplation, instead of gazing upon God. In other words, we look for comfort precisely where comfort never can be. — Frederick William Robertson

A man must be master of his hours and days, not their servant. — William Frederick Book

We strain hardest for things which are almost, but now quite within reach. — Frederick William Faber

The Blessed Sacrament is the magnet of souls. There is a mutual attraction between Jesus and the souls of men. Mary drew Him down from heaven. Our nature attracted Him rather than the nature of angels. Our misery caused Him to stoop to our lowness. Even our sins had a sort of attraction for the abundance of His mercy and the predilection of His grace. Our repentance wins Him to us. Our love makes earth a paradise to Him; and our souls lure Him as gold lures the miser, with irresistible fascination — Frederick William Faber

I will tell you what to hate. Hate hypocrisy, hate cant, hate indolence, oppression, injustice; hate Pharisaism; hate them as Christ hated them with a deep, living, godlike hatred. — Frederick William Robertson

God's truth is too sacred to be expounded to superficial worldliness in its transient fit of earnestness. — Frederick William Robertson

Heaven begun is the living proof that makes the heaven to come credible. Christ in you is "the hope of glory." It is the eagle eye of faith which penetrates the grave, and sees far into the tranquil things of death. He alone can believe in immortality who feels the resurrection in him already. — Frederick William Robertson

The words of an old hymn come to mind: But we make His love too narrow By false limits of our own; And we magnify His strictness With a zeal He will not own. For the love of God is broader Than the measure of the mind; And the heart of the Eternal Is most wonderfully kind. -- - Frederick William Faber 1814-1863 — Ken Wilson

It is not in understanding a set of doctrines; not in outward comprehension of the "scheme of salvation," that rest and peace are to be found, but in taking up, in all lowliness and meekness, the yoke of the Lord Jesus Christ. — Frederick William Robertson