Frederick William Robertson Quotes - Page 2

It is not the situation which makes the man, but the man who makes the situation.

There is a past which is gone forever, but there is a future which is still our own.

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.

A silent man is easily reputed wise. A man who suffers none to see him in the common jostle and undress of life, easily gathers round him a mysterious veil of unknown sanctity, and men honor him for a saint. The unknown is always wonderful.

In God's world, for those who are in earnest, there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain (as long as it was done out of love, not personal glory)

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.

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.

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

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.

We hear in these days a great deal respecting rights--the rights of private judgment, the rights of labor, the rights of property, and the rights of man. Rights are grand things, divine things in this world of God's; but the way in which we expound these rights, alas! seems to me to be the very incarnation of selfishness. I can see nothing very noble in a man who is forever going about calling for his own rights. Alas! alas! for the man who feels nothing more grand in this wondrous, divine world than his own rights.

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.

Now see what a Christian is, drawn by the hand of Christ. He is a man on whose clear and open brow God has set the stamp of truth; one whose very eye beams bright with honor; in whose very look and bearing you may see freedom, manliness, veracity; a brave man--a noble man--frank, generous, true, with, it may be, many faults; whose freedom may take the form of impetuosity or rashness, but the form of meanness never.

The only revenge which is essentially Christian is that of retaliating by forgiveness.

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.

Through ages, through eternity, what you have done for Christ, that, and only that, you are.

A heart renewed--a loving heart--a penitent and humble heart--a heart broken and contrite, purified by love--that and only that is the rest of men. Spotlessness may do for angels, repentance unto life is the highest that belongs to man.

Read a work on the "Evidences of Christianity," and it may become highly probable that Christianity, etc., are true. This is an opinion. Feel God. Do His will, till the Absolute Imperative within you speaks as with a living voice, "Thou shalt, and thou shalt not;" and then you do not think, you know that there is a God.

... 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.

Simpler manners, purer lives; more self-denial; more earnest sympathy with the classes that lie below us, nothing short of that can lay the foundations of the Christianity which is to be hereafter, deep and broad.

Humility is that simple, inner life of real greatness, which is indifferent to magnificence, and, surrounded by it all, lives far away in the distant country of a Father's home, with the cross borne silently and self-sacrificingly in the heart of hearts.

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

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.

That friend, given to you by circumstances over which you have not control, was God's own gift.

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.

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.