Frederick William Robertson Quotes

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

The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.

There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy, hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny.

Men... are bettered and improved by trial, and refined out of broken hopes and blighted expectations.

No one can be great, or good, or happy except through the inward efforts of themselves.

Pray till prayer makes you forget your own wish, and leave it or merge it in God's will.

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.

The true aim of everyone who aspires to be a teacher should be, not to impart his own opinions, but to kindle minds.

Christ within us, the hope of glory.

Every natural longing has its natural satisfaction.

If we thirst, God has created liquids to gratify thirst. If we are susceptible of attachment, there are beings to gratify that love. If we thirst for life and love eternal, it is likely that there are an eternal life and an eternal love to satisfy that craving.

On earth we have nothing to do with success or with results, but only with being true to God, and for God; for it is sincerity, and not success, which is the sweet savor before God. The defeat of the true-hearted is victory.

Only so far as a man believes strongly, mightily, can he act cheerfully, or do anything that is worth doing.

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.

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

That prayer which does not succeed in moderating our wishes--in changing the passionate desire into still submission, the anxious, tumultuous expectation into silent surrender--is no true prayer, and proves that we have not the spirit of true prayer.

He who, with strong passions, remains chaste--he who, keenly sensitive, with manly power of indignation in him, can yet restrain himself and forgive--these are strong men, spiritual heroes.

Let a man begin in earnest with "I ought," and he will end, by God's grace, if he persevere, with "I will." Let him force himself to abound in all small offices of kindliness, attention, affectionateness, and all these for God's sake. By and by he will feel them become the habit of his soul.

... 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.

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.

Every unfulfilled aspiration of humanity in the past;

all partial representation of perfect character; all sacrifices, nay, even those of idolatry, point to the fulfillment of what want, the answer to every longing--the type of perfect humanity, the Lord Jesus Christ.

As the tree is fertilized by its own broken branches and fallen leaves, and grows out of its own decay, so men and nations are bettered and improved by trial, and refined out of broken hopes and blighted expectations.

Time and pains will do anything.

It is not by change of circumstances, but by fitting our spirits to the circumstances in which God has placed us, that we can be reconciled to life and duty.

Marriage is not a union merely between two creatures - it is a union between two spirits; and the intention of that bond is to perfect the nature of both.

What we are, and where we are, is God's providential arrange ment — God's doing, though it may be man's misdoing; and the manly and the wise way is to look your disadvantages in the face, and see what can be made out of them.

A happy home is the single spot of rest which a man has upon this earth for the cultivation of his noblest sensibilities.

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.

We are too much haunted by ourselves, projecting the central shadow of self on everything around us. And then comes the Gospel to rescue us from this selfishness. Redemption is this, to forget self in God.

Two thousand years ago there was One here on this earth who lived the grandest life that ever has been lived yet--a life that every thinking man, with deeper or shallower meaning, has agreed to call divine.

To grieve over sin is one thing, to repent is another.

In these two things the greatness of man consists, to have God dwelling in us as to impart His character to us, and to have Him dwelling in us, that we recognize His presence, and know that we are His, and He is ours. The one is salvation; the other, the assurance of it.

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

And now because you are His child, live as a child of God;

be redeemed from the life of evil, which is false to your nature, into the life of goodness, which is the truth of your being. Scorn all that is mean; hate all that is false; struggle with all that is impure Live the simple, lofty life which befits an heir of immortality.

This world is given as a prize for the men in earnest;

and that which is true of this world is truer still of the world to come.

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

There is a two-fold solemnity which belongs to the dying hour-it is the winding up of life, and it is the commencement of eternity.

Mourning after an absent God is an evidence of a love as strong, as rejoicing in a present one.

What we mean by sentimentalism is that state in which a man speaks deep and true sentiments not because he feels them strongly, but because he perceives that they are beautiful, and that it is touching and fine to say them,-things which he fain would feel, and fancies that he does feel.

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.

He who seeks truth must be content with a lonely, little-trodden path.

If he cannot worship her till she has been canonized by the shouts of the multitude, he must take his place with the members of that wretched crowd who shouted for two long hours, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" till truth, reason, and calmness were all drowned in noise.

It is not the number of books you read;

nor the variety of sermons which you hear; nor the amount of religious conversation in which you mix: but it is the frequency and the earnestness with which you meditate on these things, till the truth which may be in them becomes your own, and part of your own being, that ensures your spiritual growth.

The truest definition of evil is that which represents it as something contrary to nature; evil is evil because it is unnatural; a vine which should bear olive-berries, an eye to which blue seems yellow, would be diseased; an unnatural mother, an unnatural son, an unnatural act, are the strongest terms of condemnation.

Life, like war, is a series of mistakes,he is the best who wins the most splendid victories by the retrieval of mistakes. Forget mistakes: organize victory out of mistakes.

God's justice and love are one. Infinite justice must be infinite love. Justice is but another sign of love.

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.

In all matters of eternal truth, the soul is before the intellect;

the things of God are spiritually discerned. You know truth by being true; you recognize God by being like Him.

It is a law of our humanity, that man must know both good and evil;

he must know good through evil. There never was a principle but what triumphed through much evil; no man ever progressed to greatness and goodness but through great mistakes.

Do you want to learn holiness with terrible struggles and sore affliction and the plague of much remaining evil? Then wait before you turn to God.

The man whom society will not forgive nor restore is driven into recklessness.

The humblest occupation has in it materials of discipline for the highest heaven.