Charles Haddon Spurgeon

“Speak as educated nature suggests to you, and you will do well, but let it be educated and not raw, rude, uncultivated nature. Demosthenes took unbounded pains with his voice, and Cicero, who was naturally weak, made a long journey into Greece to correct his manner of speaking. With far nobler themes, let us not be less ambitious to excel.”

“As artists give themselves to their models, and poets to their classical pursuits, so must we addict ourselves to prayer.”

“The Word of God will be to you a bulwark and a high tower, a castle of defense against the foe. Oh, see to it that the Word of God is in you, in your very soul, permeating your thoughts, and so operating upon your outward life, that all may know you to be a true Bible-Christian, for they perceive it in your words and deeds.”

“Here is the day for the man, where is the man for the day?”

“Our silence might be better than our voices if our solitude was spent with God.”

“Most of us think too much of speech, which is but the shell of thought.”

“When you speak of heaven, let your face light up... When you speak of hell well then, your everyday face will do.”

“Care more for a grain of faith than a ton of excitement.”

“He made a pit and digged it. He was cunning in his plans and industrious in his labors. He stooped to the dirty work of digging. He did not fear to soil his own hands. He was willing to work in a ditch if others might fall therein. What mean things men will do to wreak revenge on the godly. They hunt for good men as if they were brute beasts - they that will not give them the fair chase afforded to the hare or the fox, but must secretly entrap them because they can neither run them down nor shoot them down. Our enemies will not meet us to the face for they fear us as much as they pretend to despise us. But let us look on to the end of the scene. The verse says he has fallen into the ditch that he has made. Ah, there he is. Let us laugh at his disappointment. Lo, he is himself the beast. He has hunted his own soul. The chase has brought him a goodly victim. So should it ever be.”

“Do have a mind of your own. This is not just a spiritual matter only, but one which concerns ordinary manliness. I would do many things to please my friends, but to go to hell to please them is more than I would venture.”

“Half our fears arise from neglect of the Bible.”

“Meditation puts the telescope to the eye, and enables us to see Jesus after a better sort than we could have seen Him if we had lived in the days of His flesh.”

“If God be near a church, it must pray. And if he be not there, one of the first tokens of his absence will be a slothfulness in prayer.”

“The commencement of all labor consisted in the preparation of his own soul.”

“You will never glory in God till first of all God has killed your glorying in yourself.”

“Contentment is not a power that may be exercised naturally, but a science to be acquired gradually.”

“If any young man reads this Book aright, he becomes large-hearted. He cannot hold his soul within the narrow bound of his ribs, but his great heart looks out to see where it can scatter benefits.”

“God's thoughts of you are many, let not yours be few in return.”

“We may rifle the treasures of antiquity and make the heathen contribute to the gospel even as Hiram of Tyre served under Solomon's direction for the building of the Temple.”

“You shall find it greatly mitigates the sorrow of bereavements, if before bereavement you shall have learned to surrender every day all the things which are dearest to you into the keeping of your gracious God.”