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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

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

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Receive every day as a resurrection from death, as a new enjoyment of life meet every rising sun with such sentiments of God's goodness, as if you had seen it, and all things, new-created upon your account: and under the sense of so great a blessing, let your joyful heart praise and magnify so good and glorious a Creator.
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Receive every day as a resurrection from death, as a new enjoyment of life.
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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.
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He who complains of the weather, complains of the God who ordained the weather!
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Love has no errors, for all errors are the want for love.
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God smiles when we praise and thank Him continually. Few things feel better than receiving heartfelt praise and appreciation from someone else. God loves it, too. An amazing thing happens when we offer praise and thanksgiving to God. When we give God enjoyment, our own hearts are filled with joy.
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God seeth different abilities and frailties of men, which may move His goodness to be merciful to their different improvements in virtue.
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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.
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They, therefore, who are hasty in their devotions and think a little will do, are strangers both to the nature of devotion and the nature of man they do not know that they are to learn to pray, and that prayer is to be learnt as they learn other things, by frequency, constancy, and perseverance.
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Love and pity and wish well to every soul in the world dwell in love, and then you dwell in God.
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If contempt of the world and heavenly affection is a necessary temper of christians, it is necessary that this temper appear in the whole course of their lives, in their manner of using the world, because it can have no place anywhere else.
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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.
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Perhaps there cannot be a better way of judging of what manner of spirit we are of, than to see whether the actions of our life are such as we may safely commend them to God in our prayers.
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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.
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What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?
William Law
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The eyes of our souls only then begin to see when our bodily eyes are closing.
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Nothing harms or destroys us but the wrong use of that liberty of choice which God has entrusted to us.
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Until we are renewed in the spirit of our mind and illumined in every part, our very virtues are but taught practices grafted upon a corrupt bottom
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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.
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All people desire what they believe will make them happy. If a person is not full of desire for God, we can only conclude that he is engaged with another happiness.
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