Thomas Chalmers Quotes

Guard against that vanity which courts a compliment, or is fed by it.

In the wildest anarchy of man's insurgent appetites and sins there is still a reclaiming voice,
a voice which, even when in practice disregarded, it is impossible not to own; and to which, at the very moment that we refuse our obedience, we find that we cannot refuse the homage of what ourselves do feel and acknowledge to be the best, the highest principles of our nature.

I want to feel my own nothingness, I want to give myself up in absolute resignation to God, to lie prostrate and passive at His feet, with no other disposition in my heart than that of merging my will into His will, and no other language in my mouth than that of prayer for the perfecting of His strength in my weakness.

Shakespeare is an intellectual miracle.

Judging from the tendency and effect of his arguments, an atheist does not appear positively to refuse that a God may be ... His verdict on the doctrine of God is only that it is not proven. It is not that it is disproven. He is but an atheist. He is not an anti-theist.

The best way to overcome the world is not with morality or self-discipline. Christians overcome the world by seeing the beauty and excellence of Christ. They overcome the world by seeing something more attractive than the world: Christ

It is not scholarship alone, but scholarship impregnated with religion, that tells on the great mass of society. We have no faith in the efficacy of mechanic's institutes, or even of primary and elementary schools, for building up a virtuous and well conditioned peasantry, so long as they stand dissevered from the lessons of Christian piety.

I am not one of those who underrate the value of civil and political liberty; but I am well assured that it is only the principles of Christianity which can impart true security, prosperity, and happiness either to individuals or to nations.

Thousands of men breathe, move, and live; pass off the stage of life and are heard of no more. Why? They did not a particle of good in the world; and none were blest by them, none could point to them as the instrument of their redemption; not a line they wrote, not a word they spoke, could be recalled, and so they perished
their light went out in darkness, and they were not remembered more than the insects of yesterday. Will you thus live and die, O man immortal? Live for something.

Infidelity gives nothing in return for what it takes away. What, then, is it worth? Everything valuable as a compensating power. Not a blade of grass that withers, or the ugliest weed that is flung away to rot and die, but reproduces something.

O God, impress upon me the value of time, and give regulation to all my thoughts and to all my movements.

If it be the characteristic of a worldly man that he desecrates what is holy, it should be of the Christian to consecrate what is secular, and to recognize a present and presiding divinity in all things.

Even in the fiercest uproar of our stormy passions, conscience, though in her softest whispers, gives to the supremacy of rectitude the voice of an undying testimony.

Acts of virtue ripen into habits; and the goodly and permanent result is the formation or establishment of a virtuous character.

With the magnificence of eternity before us, let time, with all its fluctuations, dwindle into its own littleness.

I take one decisive and immediate step, and resign my all to the sufficiency of my Saviour.

Regardless of how large, your vision is too small.

Enthusiasm is a virtue rarely to be met with in seasons of calm and unruffled prosperity.

Christ came to give us a justifying righteousness, and He also came to make us holy - not chiefly for the purpose of evidencing here our possession of a justifying righteousness - but for the purpose of forming and fitting us for a blessed eternity.

I feel my disease, and I feel that my want of alarm and lively affecting conviction forms its most obstinate ingredient; I try to stir up the emotion, and feel myself harassed and distressed at the impotency of my own meditations. But why linger without the threshold in the face of a warm and urgent invitation? "Come unto me." Do not think it is your office to heal one part of the disease, and Christ's to heal the remainder.

The Bible is like a wide and beautiful landscape seen afar off, dim and confused; but a good telescope will bring it near, and spread out all its rocks and trees and flowers and v__ulant fields and winding rivers at one's very feet. That telescope is the Spirit's teaching.

Write your name in kindness, love and mercy on the hearts of the thousands you come in contact with year by year, and you will never be forgotten.

The heart is not so constituted, and the only way to dispossess it of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one

Prayer does not enable us to do a greater work for God. Prayer is a greater work for God.

The public! why, the public's nothing better than a great baby.

O Heavenly Father, convert my religion from a name to a principle! Bring all my thoughts and movements into an habitual reference to Thee!

It is in those times of hopeless chaos when the sovereign hand of God is most likely to be seen.