Quote

Now if you will stop here and ask yourself why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.

William Law

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

William Law
Age: 75 †
Born: 1686
Born: January 1
Died: 1761
Died: April 9
Theologian
Writer
King's Cliffe
Northamptonshire
Asks
Purely
Christian
Inability
Tell
Intended
Heart
Primitive
Never
Christians
Neither
Ignorance
Pious
Stop
Thoroughly

More quotes by William Law

Image
He that rightly understands the reasonableness and Excellency of charity will know that it can never be excusable to waste any of our money in pride and folly.
William Law
Image
If you attempt to talk with a dying man about sports or business, he is no longer interested. He now sees other things as more important. People who are dying recognize what we often forget, that we are standing on the brink of another world.
William Law
Image
No education can be of true advantage to young women but that which trains them up in humble industry, in great plainness of living, in exact modesty of dress.
William Law
Image
The obedience of men is to imitate the obedience of angels, and rational beings on earth are to live unto God, as rational beings in heaven live unto Him.
William Law
Image
Ask what Time is, it is nothing else but something of eternal duration become finite, measurable and transitory.
William Law
Image
You have no questions to ask of any body, no new way that you need inquire after no oracle that you need to consult for whilst you shut yourself up in patience, meekness, humility, and resignation to God, you are in the very arms of Christ, your heart is His dwelling-place, and He lives and works in you.
William Law
Image
If our life is not a course of humility, self-denial, renunciation of the world, poverty of spirit, and heavenly affection, we do not live the lives of Christians.
William Law
Image
You are to think of yourself as only existing in this world to do God's will. To think that you are your own is as absurd as to think you are self-created. It is an obvious first principle that you belong completely to God.
William Law
Image
Perfection does not consist in any singular state or condition of life, or in any particular set of duties, but in holy and religious conduct of ourselves in every state of Life.
William Law
Image
Feasts and business and pleasure and enjoyments seem great things to us, whilst we think of nothing else but as soon as we add death to them they all sink into an equal littleness.
William Law
Image
The sun meets not the springing bud that stretches towards him with half the certainty that God, the source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him.
William Law
Image
Divine love is perfect peace and joy, it is a freedom from all disquiet, it is all content and happiness and makes everything to rejoice in itself.
William Law
Image
We may justly condemn ourselves as the greatest sinners we know because we know more of the folly of our own heart than we do of other people's.
William Law
Image
If anyone would tell you the shortest, surest way to all happiness and all perfection, he must tell you to make a rule to yourself to thank and praise God for everything that happens to you.
William Law
Image
The more we pay for any truth, the better is our bargain.
William Law
Image
Reading is good, hearing is good, conversation and meditation are good but then, they are only good at times and occasions, in a certain degree, and must be used and governed with such caution as we eat and drink and refresh ourselves, or they will bring forth in us the fruits of intemperance.
William Law
Image
Love has no errors, for all errors are the want for love.
William Law
Image
Man needs to be Saved from his own Wisdom as much as from his own Righteousness, for they produce one and the same corruption. Nothing saves a man from his own righteousness, but that which delivers him from his own wisdom.
William Law
Image
If someone is leaving you behind, and you are becoming jealous and embittered, keep praying that he may have success in the very matter where he is awakening your envy and whether he is helped or not, one thing is sure, that your own soul will be cleansed and ennobled.
William Law
Image
Self is the root, the tree, and the branches of all the evils of our fallen state.
William Law