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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

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William Law
Age: 75 †
Born: 1686
Born: January 1
Died: 1761
Died: April 9
Theologian
Writer
King's Cliffe
Northamptonshire
Religious
Denial
Christian
Heavenly
Lives
Christians
Spirit
Affection
Live
Humility
Self
Poverty
Life
Courses
World
Course
Renunciation

More quotes by William Law

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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.
William Law
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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.
William Law
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The merit of persons is to be no rule of our charity, but we are to do acts of kindness to those that least deserve it.
William Law
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This, and this alone, is Christianity, a universal holiness in every part of life, a heavenly wisdom in all our actions, not conforming to the spirit and temper of the world but turning all worldly enjoyments into means of piety and devotion to God.
William Law
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Where has the Scripture made merit the rule or measure of charity?.
William Law
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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.
William Law
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Hell is nothing else but nature departed or excluded from the beam of divine light.
William Law
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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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From morning to night keep Jesus in thy heart, long for nothing, desire nothing, hope for nothing but to have all that is within thee changed into the spirit and temper of the holy Jesus.
William Law
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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
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Be intent upon the perfection of the present day.
William Law
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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.
William Law
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Nothing harms or destroys us but the wrong use of that liberty of choice which God has entrusted to us.
William Law
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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
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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.
William Law
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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.
William Law
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Read whatever chapter of scripture you will, and be ever so delighted with it - yet it will leave you as poor, as empty and unchanged as it found you unless it has turned you wholly and solely to the Spirit of God, and brought you into full union with and dependence upon him.
William Law
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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.
William Law
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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
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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