Frederick William Robertson Quotes

94 Sourced Quotes

The one who will be found in trial capable of great acts of love is ever the one who is always doing considerate small ones.

Frederick William Robertson
Instruction ends in the schoolroom, but education ends only with life. A child is given to the universe to be educated.

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

Frederick William Robertson
However dark and profitless, however painful and weary, existence may have become, life is not done, and our Christian character is not won, so long as God has anything left for us to suffer, or anything left for us to do.

Frederick William Robertson
Poetry creates life; Science dissects death.

Frederick William Robertson
But if there has been on this earth no real, perfect human life, no love that never cooled, no faith that never failed, which may shine as a loadstar across the darkness of our experience, a light to light amidst all convictions of our own meanness and all suspicions of other's littleness, why, we may have a religion, but we have not a Christianity. For if we lose Him as a Brother, we cannot feel Him as a Saviour.

Frederick William Robertson
You cannot undo your acts. If you have depraved another's will, and injured another's soul, it may be in the grace of God that hereafter you will be personally accepted, and the consequence of your guilt inwardly done away; but your penitence cannot undo the evil you have done. The forgiveness of God — the blood of Christ itself — does not undo the past.

Frederick William Robertson
It is not the number of books you read, nor the variety of sermons you hear, but it is the frequency and earnestness with which you meditate on these things till the truth in them becomes your own and part of your being, that insures your growth.

Frederick William Robertson
On earth we have nothing to do with success or results, but only with being true to God, and for God. Defeat in doing right is nevertheless victory.

Frederick William Robertson
What we are, and where we are, is God's providential arrangement... and the manly and wise way is to look your disadvantages in the face, and see what can be made of them.

Frederick William Robertson
A life of prayer is a life whose litanies are ever fresh acts of self-devoting love.

Frederick William Robertson
Kindly words, sympathizing attentions, watchfulness against wounding men's sensitiveness-these cost very little, but they are priceless in their value.

Frederick William Robertson
Cold hearts are not anxious enough to doubt. Men who love will have their misgivings at times; that is not the evil. But the evil is, when men go on in that languid, doubting way, content to doubt, proud of their doubts, morbidly glad to talk about them, liking the romantic gloom of twilight, without the manliness to say,--I must and will know the truth. That did not John. Brethren, John appealed to Christ.

Frederick William Robertson
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.

Frederick William Robertson
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.

Frederick William Robertson
If the duties before us be not noble, let us ennoble them by doing them in a noble spirit; we become reconciled to life if we live in the spirit of Him who reconciled the life of God with the lowly duties of servants.

Frederick William Robertson
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...

Frederick William Robertson
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.

Frederick William Robertson
He in whose heart the law was, and who alone of all mankind was content to do it, His sacrifice alone can be the sacrifice all-sufficient in the Father's sight as the proper sacrifice of humanity; He who through the Eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, He alone can give the Spirit which enables us to present our bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. He is the only High-Priest of the universe.

Frederick William Robertson
There are few signs in a soul's state more alarming than that of religious indifference, that is, the spirit of thinking all religions equally true— the real meaning of which is, that all religions are equally false.

Frederick William Robertson
Home is the one place in all this world where hearts are sure of each other. It is the place of confidence. It is the place where we tear off that mask of guarded and suspicious coldness which the world forces us to wear in self-defense, and where we pour out the unreserved communications of full and confiding hearts. It is the spot where expressions of tenderness gush out without any sensation of awkwardness and without any dread of ridicule.

Frederick William Robertson
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.

Frederick William Robertson
The question is, whether, like the Divine Child in the Temple, we are turning knowledge into wisdom, and whether, understanding more of the mysteries of life, we are feeling more of its sacred law; and whether, having left behind the priests and the scribes and the doctors and the fathers, we are about our Father's business, and becoming wise to God.

Frederick William Robertson
My Saviour! fill up the blurred and blotted sketch which my clumsy hand has drawn of a Divine life, with the fullness of Thy perfect picture. I feel the beauty I cannot realize; robe me in Thine unutterable purity.

Frederick William Robertson
By experience; by a sense of human frailty; by a perception of "the soul of goodness in things evil;" by a cheerful trust in human nature; by a strong sense of God's love; by long and disciplined realization of the atoning love of Christ; only thus can we get a free, manly, large, princely spirit of forgiveness.

Frederick William Robertson
This is the secret of Christ's kingship— "He became obedient — wherefore God also hath highly exalted Him." And this is the secret of all obedience and all command. Obedience to a law above you subjugates minds to you who never would have yielded to mere will.

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

Frederick William Robertson
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.

Frederick William Robertson
There is rest in this world nowhere except in Christ, the manifested love of God. Trust in excellence, and the better you become, the keener is the feeling of deficiency. Wrap up all in doubt, and there is a stern voice that will thunder at last out of the wilderness upon your dream.

Frederick William Robertson
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.

Frederick William Robertson