William Law quotes

He who has learned to pray has learned the greatest secret of a holy and happy life. (William Law)
Be intent on the perfection of the present day. View quote
William Law
This, and this alone, is Christianity, a universal holiness in every part of life, a heavenly wisdom in all our actions, not conforming to the spirit and temper of the world but turning all worldly enjoyments into means of piety and devotion to God. View quote
William Law
Death is not more certainly a separation of our souls from our bodies than the Christian life is a separation of our souls from worldly tempers, vain indulgences, and unnecessary cares. View quote
William Law
If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God, it will make in the end no difference what you have chosen instead. View quote
William Law
Man needs to be Saved from his own Wisdom as much as from his own Righteousness, for they produce one and the same corruption. Nothing saves a man from his own righteousness, but that which delivers him from his own wisdom. View quote
William Law
If contempt of the world and heavenly affection is a necessary temper of christians, it is necessary that this temper appear in the whole course of their lives, in their manner of using the world, because it can have no place anywhere else. View quote
William Law
Now if you will stop here and ask yourself why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it. View quote
William Law
We must alter our lives in order to alter our hearts, for it is impossible to live one way and pray another. View quote
William Law
Love has no errors, for all errors are the want for love. View quote
William Law
God seeth different abilities and frailties of men, which may move His goodness to be merciful to their different improvements in virtue. (William Law)
What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self? View quote
William Law
No education can be of true advantage to young women but that which trains them up in humble industry, in great plainness of living, in exact modesty of dress. View quote
William Law
Faith is not a notion, but a real strong essential hunger, an attracting or magnetic desire of Christ, which as it proceeds from a seed of the divine nature in us, so it attracts and unites with its like. View quote
William Law
Love and pity and wish well to every soul in the world; dwell in love, and then you dwell in God. View quote
William Law
What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly? View quote
William Law
Hell is nothing else but nature departed or excluded from the beam of divine light. View quote
William Law
Self is the root, the tree, and the branches of all the evils of our fallen state. View quote
William Law
Ask what Time is, it is nothing else but something of eternal duration become finite, measurable and transitory. View quote
William Law
All people desire what they believe will make them happy. If a person is not full of desire for God, we can only conclude that he is engaged with another happiness. View quote
William Law
Men are not in hell because God is angry with them. They are in wrath and darkness because they have done to the light, which infinitely flows forth from God, as that man does to the light who puts out his own eyes . (William Law)
So that Christianity is so far from leaving us to live in the common ways of life, conforming to the folly of customs, and gratifying the passions and tempers which the spirit of the world delights in, it is so far from indulging us in any of these things, that all its virtues which it makes necessary to salvation are only so many ways of living above and contrary to the world, in all the common actions of our life. If our common life is not a common course of humility, self-denial, renunciation of the world, poverty of spirit, and heavenly affection, we do not live the lives of Christians. View quote
William Law
The Deists, and unbelievers, have a great share of my compassionate affections, and I never can think, or write of the infinite blessings of the Christian redemption, without feeling in my heart, an impatient longing to see them the happy partakers of them. And as one naturally believes, what one strongly wishes; so I cannot help hoping, that both Christians and Deists will here find truths of such a nature, as must in some degree touch their hearts, if not read with prejudice and aversion. OF THE Nature and Necessity OF R E G E N E R A T I O N, OR, THE N E W - B I R T H. View quote
William Law
He that is endeavouring to subdue, and root out of his mind, all those passions of pride, envy and ambition, which religion opposes, is doing more to make himself happy, even in this life than he that is contriving means to indulge them. View quote
William Law
You can have no greater sign of confirmed pride than when you think you are humble enough. View quote
William Law