Talk:Charles Spurgeon

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• A good character is the best tombstone. Those who loved you and were helped by you will remember you when forget-me-nots have withered. Carve your name on hearts, not on marble.

• A sense of satisfaction with yourself will be the death of your progress.

• What a mercy it is that it is not your hold of Christ that saves you, but his hold of you!

• All the water in the sea will not hurt the vessel one thousandth part as much as that which comes into it. Are you God's servant or not? If you are, how can your heart be cold?

• Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength.

• As sure as ever God puts His children in the furnace, He will be in the furnace with them.

• Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.

• Do not begin to teach others until the Lord has taught you.

• Do not spare yourself and become self-satisfied; but on the other hand, do not slander yourself and sink into despondency. Your own opinion of your state is not worth much; ask the Lord to search you.

• Every Christian man has a choice between being humble and being humbled.

• Everything is a trifle to a man who is a Christian except the glorifying of Christ.

• Everything the Spirit of God does is substance, not shadow. The baseless fabric of a vision is the work of man.

• God helps those who cannot help themselves.

• God is more ready to forgive me than I am ready to offend.

• God will not have his people eat the fat and drink the sweet unless they are prepared to carry their burden and give a portion to others, as well as seek meat for themselves.

• He who does not love sinners cannot pray aright for them.

• He will not be a wise man who does not study the human heart.

• Humility is to make a right estimate of one's self. It is no humility for a man to think less of himself than he ought, though it might rather puzzle him to do that.

• I believe that our God is best praised in common things. He who molds a shoe with a right motive is praising God as much as the seraph who pours forth his celestial sonnet.

• I do not know any subject that so much depresses me, humbles me, and lays me in the dust, as the thought of my omissions.

• I have now concentrated all my prayers into one, and that one prayer is this, that I may die to self, and live wholly to him.

• I would rather believe a limited atonement that is efficacious for all men for whom it was intended, than a universal atonement that is not efficacious for anybody, except the will of men be added to it.

• If a man would speak without any present study, he must study much.

• If He bids us carry a burden, He carries it also.

• If there be anything I know, anything that I am quite assured of beyond all question, it is that praying breath is never spent in vain.

• In every well-ordered congregation there are seats emptied by holy service. Many Christians appear to think that their entire religious duty begins and ends with attending church, but no village station receives their ministry, no ragged school enjoys their presence, no street corner hears their voice— but their pew is filled with commendable constancy. We do not condemn such, yet we show them a more excellent way.

• In nothing shall the glory of God be marred.

• It has been said that our anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, but only empties today of its strength.

• It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness.

• It is the will of God that saves. It is the will of man that damns.

• It’s a good thing God chose me before I was born, because he surely would not have afterwards.

• Jesus poured out his soul in life before he poured it out unto death.

• Live by the day—aye, by the hour. Put no trust in frames and feelings. Care more for a grain of faith than a ton of excitement. Trust in God alone, and lean not on the needs of human help. Be not surprised when friends fail you; it is a failing world. Never count on immutability in man.

• Many a man has reached the summit of a life-long ambition and found it to be mere vanity. In gaining all he has lost all; wealth has come, but the power to enjoy it has gone; life has been worn out in the pursuit, and no strength is left with which to enjoy the game. It shall not be so with the man who lives by faith, for his chief joys are above, and his comfort lies within. To him God is joy so rich that other joy is comparatively flavorless.

• Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties.

• Men will allow God to be everywhere except on his Throne.

• My hope arises from the freeness of grace, and not from the freedom of the will.

• Never fear dying, beloved. Dying is the last, but the least, matter that a Christian has to be anxious about. Fear living—that is a hard battle to fight, a stern discipline to endure, a rough voyage to undergo.

• No one is so miserable as the poor person who maintains the appearance of wealth.

• No one knows who is listening, say nothing you would not wish put in the newspapers.

• Nobody ever outgrows Scripture; the book widens and depends with our years.

• None are more unjust in their judgments of others than those who have a high opinion of themselves.

• Nothing can enter heaven which is not real; nothing erroneous, mistaken, conceited, hollow, professional, pretentious, insubstantial, can be smuggled through the gates. Only truth can dwell with the God of truth.

• Nothing puts life into men like a dying Savior.

• Only he is fit to preach who cannot avoid preaching, who feels that woe is upon him unless he preach the gospel.

• Only that prayer which comes from our heart can get to God’s heart.

• Our infirmities of judgment are aggravated by our imperfections of character, and by our walking at a distance from God.

• Our places will be empty soon. Cheer the aged, console the desponding, help the poor, for they will soon be beyond your reach.

• Our Savior used no force, neither did he use any means which might enlist man's lower nature on his side.

• Personally, I have to bless God for many good books; I thank Him for Dr. Doddridge's Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul; for Baxter's Call to the Unconverted; for Alleine's Alarm to Sinners; and for James's Anxious Enquirer, but my gratitude most of all is due to God, not for books, but for the preached Word, -- and that too addressed to me by a poor, uneducated man, a man who had never received any training for the ministry, and probably will never be heard of in this life, a man engaged in business, no doubt of a humble kind, during the week, but who had just enough of grace to say on the Sabbath, 'Look unto Me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.'. The books were good, but the man was better. The revealed Word awakened me; but it was the preached Word that saved me; and I must ever attach peculiar value to the hearing of the truth, for by it I received the joy and peace in which my soul delights.

• Sirs, as far as you can, you do kill God, for you put him out of your thoughts, you make nothing of him, and what is that but the crucifixion of God? You despise him so much that his presence has no effect upon you.

• Show me the business man or institution not guided by sentiment and service; by the idea that "he profits most who serves best" and I will show you a man or an outfit that is dead or dying.

• Sincerity makes the very least person to be of more value than the most talented hypocrite.

• Some men of little faith are perpetually enshrouded with fears; their faith seems only strong enough to enable them to doubt.

• Ten minutes praying is better than a year’s murmuring.

• The Christian should work as if all depended on him, and pray as if it all depended on God.

• The dog hole of selfishness can never afford you any comfort. When the first and last concern of a man is simply his own feelings, or his own enjoyment, he cannot get any good feelings or any enjoyment either.

• The holier a man becomes, the more he mourns over the unholiness which remains in him.

• The keenest griefs cut a narrow but deep channel, and as they wear into the inmost soul they flow without noise.

• The Lord gets His best soldiers out of the highlands of affliction.

• The Lord Jesus fills out every type, figure, and character. Creation is too small a frame in which to hang his likeness. Human thought is too contracted, human speech too feeble, to set him forth to the full. He is inconceivably above our conceptions, inutterably above our utterances.

• The more we pray, the more we shall want to pray. The more we pray, the more we can pray. The more we pray, the more we shall pray. He who prays little will pray less, but he who prays much will pray more. And he who prays more, will desire to pray more abundantly.

• The preacher who neglects to pray much must be very careless about his ministry. He cannot have comprehended his calling. He cannot have computed the value of a soul, or estimated the meaning of eternity.

• The sins of disciples of Christ are a thousand times worse than the sins of unbelievers, because they sin against a gospel of love, a covenant of mercy, against a sweet experience and against precious promises.

• The things I preach are part and parcel of myself. I am sure that they are true. When I declare God's truth, I claim infallibility not for myself, but for God's Word.

• The world is full of grinding poverty and crushing sorrow; shame and death are the portion of thousands, and it needs a great gospel to meet the dire necessities of people's souls.

• There are no crown-wearers in heaven who were not cross-bearers here below.

• There are three stages of the human soul in connection with Christ. The first is “without Christ.” This is the state of nature. The next is “in Christ.” This is the state of grace. The third is “with Christ.” That is the state of glory.

• There is no happiness comparable to a complete submergence of self into the glory of God.

• There is not a spider hanging on the wall that doesn’t have an errand; there is not a weed growing in the corner of the church lot that doesn’t have a purpose; there is not a single insect fluttering in the breeze that does not accomplish some divine decree. And I will never believe that God created any man, especially any Christian man, to be a blank, and to be a nothing.

• There is something for us to do in the wilderness, and so we are kept out of the heavenly garden for now.

• To be prepared to die is to be prepared to live. To be ready for eternity is in the best sense to be ready for time. Who is so fit to live on earth as the man who is fit to live in heaven?

• To know what men have already done is a light matter compared with knowing what men will yet do.

• Trials teach us what we are; they dig up the soil, and let us see what we are made of.

• We are not called to proclaim philosophy and metaphysics, but the simple gospel.

• We are not what we ought to be, we are not what we want to be, we are not what we shall be. But we are something very different from what we used to be.

• We cling with dreadful tenacity to this poor life, and the little pleasures which we foolishly call our all.

• We have a large class of poor creatures, who, while not discontent with others, are discontent with themselves. They are not what they like to be, and they are not what they wish to be, and they don't feel as they should feel, and they don't think as they would like to think. They are always plunging their finger into their own eyes, because they cannot see as well as they wish, always ripping up the wounds they have, making themselves miserable in order that they may be happy, and at last, crying themselves into an inconsolable state of misery, they acquire a habit of mourning, until that mourning seems to be the only bliss they know.

• What we mean by salvation is this—deliverance from the love of sin, rescue from the habit of sin, setting free from the desire to sin.

• When God looks at a man's life, he sees infinitely more in it than the man ever saw in it himself, or that all his fellow creatures have seen. As when a man looks on a map and the whole of the country is before him, so does God look down upon our life as it is spread out for his inspection, and he sees it all at once.

• When the book of God's purposes shall be all unfolded in actual history there will be found no blots, mistakes and blunders there. He knows the end from the beginning and his purposes shall be fulfilled in every jot and tittle, and in nothing shall the glory of God be marred. Though Satan may be laughing now, and every now and then the men of the world may boast against the people of God, it shall not be so in the close of the affair.

• Whenever you have much joy, be cautious; there is sorrow down the road. But when you have much sadness be hopeful; there is a joy on the way to you, be sure of that. Our blessed Lord reveals himself to his people more in the valleys, in the shades, in the deeps, than he does anywhere else. He has a way and an art of showing himself to his children at midnight, making the darkness light by his presence.

• You are the creature of the Almighty. In every vein and sinew and nerve of your body, there are traces of the Divine Embroiderer's skill. Day by day you are a commoner at the table of divine bounty, a pensioner hour by hour upon the infinite mercy of God. You have nothing and are nothing but as God pleases. You owe all you have and all you are to him.

• You cannot see the beauty of certain gems unless you place them on black velvet.

• You might not always get what you want, but you always get what you expect.

• Your reputation may be dead and buried, but if you have not killed it by your own conduct, it will have a resurrection; and when it rises again it will be much more fair and beautiful than it was before. Rest in the Lord and wait patiently for him, for he will do the justice in due time for thou art his own, and he will not forget thee.

• The old truth that Calvin preached, that Augustine preached, that Paul preached, is the truth that I must preach to-day, or else be false to my conscience and my God. I cannot shape the truth; I know of no such thing as paring off the rough edges of a doctrine. John Knox's gospel is my gospel. That which thundered through Scotland must thunder through England again.

• I do not come into this pulpit hoping that perhaps somebody will of his own free will return to Christ. My hope lies in another quarter. I hope that my Master will lay hold of some of them and say, "You are mine, and you shall be mine. I claim you for myself." My hope arises from the freeness of grace, and not from the freedom of the will.