Three Thousand Selected Quotations from Brilliant Writers/I
IGNORANCE.
He that voluntarily continues ignorant is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces.
Bring your ignorance to the Holy Spirit, the great teacher, who by His precious truth will lead you into all truth.
IMMORTALITY.
Immortality! We bow before the very term. Immortality! Before it reason staggers, calculation reclines her tired head, and imagination folds her weary pinions. Immortality! It throws open the portals of the vast forever; it puts the crown of deathless destiny upon every human brow; it cries to every uncrowned king of men, "Live forever, crowned for the empire of a deathless destiny!"
The soul secured in her existence, smiles
At the drawn dagger, and defies its point.
The stars shall fade away, the sun himself
Grow dim with age, and nature sink in years,
But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,
Unhurt amidst the war of elements,
The wreck of matter, and the crash of worlds.
Earthly providence is a travesty of justice on any other theory than that it is a preliminary stage, which is to be followed by rectifications. Either there must be a future, or consummate injustice sits upon the throne of the universe. This is the verdict of humanity in all the ages.
Without a belief in personal immortality, religion surely is like an arch resting on one pillar, like a bridge ending in an abyss.
Whence comes the powerful impression that is made upon us by the tomb? Are a few grains of dust deserving of our veneration? Certainly not; we respect the ashes of our ancestors for this reason only—because a secret voice whispers to us that all is not extinguished in them. It is this that confers a sacred character on the funeral ceremony among all the nations of the globe; all are alike persuaded that the sleep, even of the tomb, is not everlasting, and that death is but a glorious transfiguration.
See truth, love, and mercy in triumph descending,
And nature all glowing in Eden's first bloom!
On the cold cheek of death smiles and roses are blending,
And beauty immortal awakes from the tomb.
Tell me why the caged bird flutters against its prison bars, and I will tell you why the soul sickens of earthliness. The bird has wings, and wings were made to cleave the air, and soar in freedom in the sun. The soul is immortal—it cannot feed upon husks.
I feel that I was made to complete things. To accomplish only a mass of beginnings and attempts would be to make a total failure of life. Perfection is the heritage with which my Creator has endowed me, and since this short life does not give completeness, I must have immortal life in which to find it.
God does nothing in vain. When He gives a power, it is for a purpose, it is that it may reach an end. Now what I argue is this: Since He has put in my soul a germ that can grow to eternity, He means that it shall grow to eternity.
It is our souls which are the everlastingness of God's purpose in this earth.
May we be satisfied with nothing that shall not have in it something of immortality.
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.
The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous, yet simple.
No martyr ever went the way of duty, and felt the shadow of death upon it. The shadow of death is darkest in the valley, which men walk in easily, and is never felt at all on a steep place, like Calvary. Truth is everlasting, and so is every lover of it; and so he feels himself almost always.
Let a disciple live as Christ lived, and he will easily believe in living again as Christ does.
IMPENITENT.
It is not sin that kills the soul, but impenitence.
He that has no present Christ has a future, dark, chaotic, heaving with its destructive ocean; and over it there goes forever—black-pinioned, winging its solitary and hopeless flight, the raven of his anxious thoughts, and finds no place to rest, and comes back again to the desolate ark with its foreboding croak of evil in the present and evil in the future.
Oh, prodigal, you may be wandering on the dark mountains of sin, but God wants you to come home. The devil has been telling you lies about God; you think He will not receive you back. I tell you, He will welcome you this minute if you will come. Say, "I will arise and go to my Father."
You admit there is a God; yet you offer Him no homage; you never worship Him. You admit that you are a sinner; yet you exercise no repentance; you make no effort to become holy; you make no use of the means to secure pardon, and to avoid the wrath to come. You admit that you can be saved only by the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ; yet you are not seeking to obtain an interest in His blood. You profess to believe that there is a heaven; yet you are making no efforts to secure it; a hell, yet you make no efforts to avoid it.
Ye will not pray; ye will not shun temptation; ye will not renounce known sin; ye will not fight against evil habits! Are ye stronger than God? Can ye contend with the Eternal One? Have ye the nerve which shall not tremble, and the flesh which shall not quiver, and the soul which shall not quail, when the sheet of fire is round the globe, and thousand times ten thousand angels line the sky, and call to judgment?
We pray for those who have ceased to pray. We pray for those that need prayer more than ever, that have fewer and fewer seasons even of thought, that grow hard with years, that are less and less troubled by sin, and that are more and more irreverent of religion. We pray for the children of Christian parents who sometimes weep at the memory of father and mother, but who never have thought of God.
Staying where you now are, you must perish; coming to Christ, you can but perish; coming to Christ, no one ever did perish; while you sit still and starve, there is bread enough and to spare in your Father's house. Will you return?
He that forgets his friend is ungrateful to him, but he that forgets the Saviour is unmerciful to himself.
Amid the stirring and manifold activities of the age in which we live, to be neutral in the strife is to rank with the enemies of the Saviour. There is no greater foe to the spread of His cause in the world than the placid indifferentism which is too honorable to betray, while it is too careless or too cowardly to join Him.
There is a test point about you somewhere. Perhaps it is pride; you cannot bear an affront; you will not confess a fault. Perhaps it is personal vanity, ready to sacrifice every thing to display. Perhaps it is a sharp tongue. Perhaps it is some sensual appetite, bent on its unclean gratification. Then you are to gather up your moral forces just here, and, till that darling sin is brought under the practical law of Christ, you are shut out of Christ's kingdom.
God calls you—alike by Scripture, by your reason, by your conscience, by the events of His providence, by heavenly influences—to consecrate all you have to His service and the good of man; Heaven appeals to you, and the world appeals to you, not to live in vain.
Be reconciled to God. Distinctly and deliberately devote yourself to His service. Lead a life of daily devotion. Renounce besetting sins. Make the Lord's service your study.
God is summoning you. Angels are summoning you. The myriads who have gone before are summoning you. We are surrounded by a "great cloud of witnesses." The battlements of the sky seem thronged with those who have fought the good fight of faith. They bend down from the eminence, and bid us ascend, through the one Mediator, to the same lofty dwelling.
Thirsty, weary, dissatisfied in this sultry life, come as you are; come at once; come because you are invited; as you would not do affront to infinite Generosity, come, and drink, and live forever.
Time flies, death urges, knells call, heaven invites, hell threatens!
I bring you to the dead body of Christ. I ask you to look at the wounds in His hands and feet, and the wound in His side. And I ask you, "Will you not be reconciled?"
Go to Jesus, O sinner, this day, this moment, with all thy sins about thee. Go just as thou art, for if thou wilt never apply to Him till thou art first righteous and holy, thou wilt never be righteous and holy at all.
Ah, sinner, may the Lord quicken thee! But it is a work that makes the Saviour weep. I think when He comes to call some of you from your death in sin, He comes weeping and sighing for you. There is a stone that is to be rolled away—your bad and evil habits—and when that stone is taken away, a still small voice will not do for you; it must be the loud crashing voice, like the voice of the Lord which breaketh the cedars of Lebanon.
Sinner, listen now. Christ knocks again. Here, in the hush of this still hour, He waits to be received and welcomed. Peace like a river, joy such as angels do not know, hopeful of an ever-brightening and evermore blessed immortality—all heavenly benedictions would be thine—"if thou knewest the gift of God."
There the patient hand still knocketh,
And with every patient watching,
With the sad eyes true and tender,
With the glory-crowned hair,—
Still a God is waiting there.
It is a very solemn thought that God will excuse you if you want to be excused. He does not wish to do it, but He will do it.
A brother in the Lord could never get a young lady to think about eternity until he quoted this text: "The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God." That word forget seemed to haunt her. May it haunt you, dear reader.
Let no time be spent in arguments. I believe that is a work of the devil, to take off attention, and cause delay. If a man comes to argue, we should go down on our knees, pray with him, and then let him go.
INDIFFERENCE.
There are few signs in a soul's state more alarming than that of religious indifference, that is, the spirit of thinking all religions equally true—the real meaning of which is, that all religions are equally false.
Indifference, if let alone, will produce obduracy; and obduracy, if let alone, will produce torment.
INDOLENCE.
Indolence is the worst enemy that the church has to encounter. Men sleep around her altar, stretching themselves on beds of ease, or sit idly with folded hands looking lazily out on fields white for the harvest, but where no sickle rings against the wheat.
At ease in a world in which my Lord was such a sufferer!
The passive idler of all men in the world is the most difficult to please. Those who do the least themselves are always the severest critics upon the noble achievements of others.
The idle man is the devil's cushion.
If you are idle, you are on the road to ruin; and there are few stopping places upon it. It is rather a precipice than a road.
Idleness is the great corrupter of youth, and the bane and dishonor of middle age. He who, in the prime of life, finds time to hang heavy on his hands, may with much reason suspect that he has not consulted the duties which the consideration of his age imposed upon him; assuredly he has not consulted his happiness.
An idle man has a constant tendency to torpidity. He has adopted the Indian maxim—that it is better to walk than to run, and better to stand than to walk, and better to sit than to stand, and better to lie than to sit. He hugs himself into the notion, that God calls him to be quiet.
Some temptations come to the industrious, but all temptations attack the idle.
Be always employed about some rational thing that the devil find thee not idle.
A good many people are complaining all the time about themselves, and crying out, "My leanness! my leanness!" when they ought rather to say, "My laziness! my laziness!"
I am not the only one that condemns the idle; for once when I was going to give our minister a pretty long list of the sins of one of our people that he was asking after, I began with, "He's dreadfully lazy." "That's enough," said the old gentleman; "all sorts of sins are in that one."
The worst idleness is that of the heart. Think of the condition and prospects of a voiceless, thankless, prayerless heart.
When you and I are inclined to nestle down in indolence and self-indulgence, God "stirs up our nests;" and bids us fly upward.
The only cure for indolence is work; the only cure for selfishness is sacrifice; the only cure for unbelief is to shake off the ague of doubt, by doing Christ's bidding; the only cure for timidity is to plunge into some dreaded duty before the chill comes on.
INDUSTRY.
The Lord's visitations of distinguished favor are always to the diligent. That great men may not be ashamed of honest vocations, the greatest that have ever lived have been contented, happy, and honored while in the pursuit of humble trades.
The most profitable and praiseworthy genius in the world is untiring industry.
Industry doth not consist merely in action; for that is incessant in all persons, our mind being a restless thing, never abiding in a total cessation from thought or design; being like a ship in the sea, if not steered to some good purpose by reason, yet tossed by the waves of fancy, or driven by the winds of temptation somewhither. But the direction of our mind to some good end, without roving or flinching, in a straight and steady course, drawing after it our active powers in execution thereof, doth constitute industry.
The gospel does not abolish industry, but changes its nature and chief design; it dignifies toil, mitigates the evils connected therewith, and creates new motives to diligence. The triumph achieved on Calvary never was designed to supersede the duty of close application to enterprising duty. Its first command compels us to some honorable and useful pursuit. Its language is, "Study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands as we commanded you." "If any man will not work, neither let him eat."
INFIDELITY.
No matter where the skeptical thought originates, or how it gets access to our minds, we see at once that it flattens the level of life and every aspiration. It makes our character less vigorous. The gospel is not simply a philosophy of religion or law of life, but it is an apocalypse, showing the heavens to our thought, and so bringing its spiritual benedictions to every heart and life.
Admit their maxims, and the universe returns to a frightful chaos; all things are thrown into disorder upon the earth; all the notions of virtue and vice are overthrown; the most inviolable laws of society are abolished: the discipline of morality is swept away; the government of states and empires ceases to be subject to any rule; the whole harmony of political institutions is dissolved; and the human race becomes an assemblage of madmen, barbarians, cheats, unnatural wretches who have no other laws but force, no other curb than their passions and the dread of authority, no other tie than irreligion and independence, no other gods than themselves.
The nurse of infidelity is sensuality. Youth are sensual. The Bible stands in their way. It prohibits the indulgence of the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life.
What ardently we wish, we soon believe.
There is not a single spot between Christianity and atheism, upon which a man can firmly fix his foot.
There is one single fact that one may oppose to all the wit and argument of infidelity; namely, that no man ever repented of being a Christian on his death-bed.
The infidelity that springs from the heart is not to be reached by a course of lectures on the evidences of Christianity; argument did not cause, and argument will not remove it.
The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
There never yet was a mother who taught her child to be an infidel.
O Lord God, cleanse us from the infidelity of our every-day life, and bring us into the spirit of Jesus, that love may reign triumphant in us, and that we may glorify our Father in heaven.
Is it for the cultivated man, the man of broad and general views, to throw himself without reserve and with all his weight, into what, for aught he yet knows, may be only a cross-current and eddy, instead of the main stream of truth?
I know not any crime so great that a man could contrive to commit as poisoning the sources of eternal truth.
Freethinkers are generally those that never think at all.
Reason is the test of ridicule, not ridicule the test of truth.
When you see a mad dog, don't argue with him unless you are sure of your logic.
In my judgment, a great mistake has been made by well-meaning and zealous men, through treating error and infidelity with altogether too much respect. I believe that it is safe to say that Christianity is indebted for none of its progress in the world to rational conflicts with infidelity. I do not believe that a single great wrong has ever been overthrown by meeting the advocates of wrong in argument.
INFLUENCE.
The Bible calls the good man's life a light; and it is the nature of light to flow out spontaneously in all directions, and fill the world unconsciously with its beams. So the Christian shines it would say, not so much because he will, as because he is a luminous object. Not that the active influence of Christians is made of no account in the figure, but only that this symbol of light has its propriety in the fact that their unconscious influence is the chief influence, and has the precedence in its power over the world. The outward endeavors made by good men or bad to sway others, they call their influence; whereas it is, in fact, but a fraction, and, in most cases, but a very small fraction of the good or evil that flows out of their lives.
What we do is transacted on a stage of which all the Universe are spectators. What we say is transmitted in echoes that will never cease. What we are is influencing and acting on the rest of mankind. Neutral we cannot be. Living, we act; and dead, we speak; and the whole universe is the mighty company forever looking, forever listening, and all nature the tablets, forever recording the words, the deeds, the thoughts, the passions of mankind.
If you had the seeds of a pestilence in your body, you would not have a more active contagion than you have in your tempers, tastes, and principles. Simply to be in this world, whatever you are, is to exert an influence—an influence, too, compared with which mere language and persuasion are feeble.
No man is so insignificant as to be sure his example can do no hurt.
To get good is animal; to do good is human, to be good is Divine. The true use of a man's possessions is to help his work; and the best end of all his work is to show us what he is. The noblest workers of our world bequeath us nothing so great as the image of themselves. Their task, be it ever so glorious, is historical and transient, the majesty of their spirit is essential and eternal.
Every word, thought, and deed has its influence upon the destiny of man. Every life, well spent or ill spent, bears with it a long train of consequences, extending through generations yet unborn.
No fountain is so small but that heaven may be imaged in its bosom.
The serene, silent beauty of a holy life is the most powerful influence in the world, next to the might of the Spirit of God.
Thank God! some lights never go out. Death cannot quench them. They shine forever. Luther's great lantern, "The just shall live by faith," still gleams from Wartburg Castle. John Bunyan's lamp twinkles yet through the gratings of Bedford jail.
My mother spoke of Christ to father, by her feminine and childlike virtues, and, after having borne his violence without a murmur of complaint, gained him at the close of his life to Christ.
INTEGRITY.
Give us a man, young or old, high or low, on whom we know we can thoroughly depend—who will stand firm when others fail—the friend faithful and true, the adviser honest and fearless, the adversary just and chivalrous; in such an one there is a fragment of the Rock of Ages—a sign that there has been a prophet amongst us.
Honesty is the best policy, but he who acts on that principle is not an honest man.
Though a hundred crooked paths may conduct to a temporary success, the one plain and straight path of public and private virtue can alone lead to a pure and lasting fame and the blessings of posterity.
Aaron Burr was a more brilliant man than George Washington. If he had been loyal to truth, he would have been an abler man; but that which made George Washington the chief hero in our great republic was the sagacity, not of intellectual genius, but of the moral element in him.
The man who, for party, forsakes righteousness, goes down; and the armed battalions of God march over him.
Gold thou mayest safely touch, but if it stick
Unto thy hands, it woundeth to the quick.
INTELLECT.
The intellect has only one failing, which to be sure, is a very considerable one. It has no conscience. Napoleon is the readiest instance of this. If his heart had borne any proportion to his brain, he had been one of the greatest men of history.
She should be my counsellor,
But not my tyrant. For the spirit needs
Impulses from a deeper source than hers;
And there are motions, in the mind of man,
That she must look upon with awe.
Every thing connected with intellect is permanent.
Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as strong to think.
INTEMPERANCE.
Intemperance is a hydra with a hundred heads. She never stalks abroad unaccompanied with impurity, anger, and the most infamous profligacies.
Other vices make their own way; this makes way for all vices. He that is a drunkard is qualified for all vice.
Oh, that men should put an enemy in
Their mouths, to steal away their brains.
Voluptuous habits speedily bind all the powers of the soul in loathsome vassalage, and exclude every thought except such as relate to the beastly pleasures of which it is the slave. Distracted by cravings as inexorable as they are base, and in their vileness perpetually reproduced,—tantalized by the impure fountains of a diseased imagination, and oppressed with its own effeminacy,—the mind loses its vigor and its productiveness. Every faculty rapidly deteriorates and decays; memory becomes extinguished, inanity destroys resolution, and the heart is as cold and callous as a cinder extinct. It ceases to love, to sympathize, and diffuse the delicious tears that sanctify friendship's shrine. The whole countenance assumes an expression of obdurateness and repugnance. The features, marked with premature decay, proclaim that the source of gentle sentiments, pure emotions, and innocent joys, is exhausted, like a limpid fountain invaded by the scoria and flame of a volcano. All the elements of life seem to have retreated into their abused organs only to perish there. Even the organs themselves are withered, and worse than dead; their infirmities, maladies, sufferings, rush in a multitude upon the degraded victim, and overwhelm him in awful retribution.