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Famous Quotes of Saint Augustine

Our Masters Voice — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:01:09 +0000

Saint Augustine

After the conversion of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, the dramatic conversion of St. Augustine – as he himself tells it in his Confessions – is the most significant conversion story in Christian history.Augustine is considered the most important early church father in history of the church. He was one of the widely quoted Christian Church Father.

Famous Quote: Thou hast created us for Thyself, and our heart is not quiet until it rests in Thee.

Saint Augustinee: Augustine of Hippo

Born: November 13, 354 in North Africa

Died: August 28, 430

Quotes of Saint Augustine:

Love:

God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.

Love is the beauty of the soul.

What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.

Humility:

It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels.

Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.

Do you wish to be great? Then begin by being. Do you desire to construct a vast and lofty fabric? Think first about the foundations of humility. The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation.

Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not exist there cannot be any other virtue except in mere appearance.

There is something in humility which strangely exalts the heart.

Faith:

Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.

Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.

Giving:

Find out how much God has given you and from it take what you need; the remainder is needed by others.

Forgiveness:

Forgiveness is the remission of sins. For it is by this that what has been lost, and was found, is saved from being lost again.

Jealousy:

He that is jealous is not in love.

Bondage of Sin:

Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.

O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet.

To abstain from sin when one can no longer sin is to be forsaken by sin, not to forsake it.

Suffering:

God had one son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering.

God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.

Salvation:

He who created us without our help will not save us without our consent.

Wisemen:

I have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are wise and very beautiful; but I have never read in either of them: Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden.

Friends:

If two friends ask you to judge a dispute, don’t accept, because you will lose one friend; on the other hand, if two strangers come with the same request, accept because you will gain one friend.

Believing the Bible:

If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself.

About Miracles:

Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.

About Adultery:

Passion is the evil in adultery. If a man has no opportunity of living with another man’s wife, but if it is obvious for some reason that he would like to do so, and would do so if he could, he is no less guilty than if he was caught in the act.

Patience:

Patience is the companion of wisdom.

Prayer:

Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.

The desire is thy prayers; and if thy desire is without ceasing, thy prayer will also be without ceasing. The continuance of your longing is the continuance of your prayer.

Last Week I heard Max McLean’s moving rendition of St. Augustine’s Conversion sends chills down the listener’s spine. Quentin J. Schultze, Ph.D. It was awesome.

Mother Teresa – Life of Sacrifice and Love

admin — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:20:02 +0000

Mother Teresa:

Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Macedonia, on August 26, 1910. Her family was of Albanian descent. At the age of twelve, she felt strongly the call of God. She knew she had to be a missionary to spread the love of Christ. At the age of eighteen she left her parental home in Skopje and joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India. After a few months’ training in Dublin she was sent to India, where on May 24, 1931, she took her initial vows as a nun.

From 1931 to 1948 Mother Teresa taught at St. Mary’s High School in Calcutta, but the suffering and poverty she glimpsed outside the convent walls made such a deep impression on her that in 1948 she received permission from her superiors to leave the convent school and devote herself to working among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta. Although she had no funds, she depended on Divine Providence, and started an open-air school for slum children. Soon she was joined by voluntary helpers, and financial support was also forthcoming. This made it possible for her to extend the scope of her work.

By the 1970s she had become internationally famed as a humanitarian and advocate for the poor and helpless, due in part to a documentary, and book, Something Beautiful for God by Malcolm Muggeridge. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and India’s highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna, in 1980 for her humanitarian work. Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity continued to expand, and at the time of her death it was operating 610 missions in 123 countries, including hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, soup kitchens, children’s and family counseling programs, orphanages, and schools.

Quotes of Mother Teresa:

On God:

Words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.

I am not sure exactly what Heaven will be like. But I don’t know that when we die and if comes the time for God to judge us, He will not ask, “How many good things have you done in your life?” Rather He will ask, “How much love did you put into what you did?”

I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.

Let’s do something beautiful for God.
On Love:

The fruit of faith is love.

A joyful heart is the inevitable result of a heart burning with love.

Love cannot remain by itself… it has no meaning. Love has to be put into action, and that actiis service.

God told us, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” So first I am to love myself rightly, and then to love my neighbor like that. But how can I love myself unless I accept myself as God has made me?

It is easy to love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to us. It is easier to give a cup of rice to relieve hunger than to relieve the loneliness and pain of someone unloved in our own home. Bring love into your home for this is where our love for each other must start.

Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.

Love is like a fruit in season at all times. Love can warm three winter months.

The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.

There is more hunger in the world for love and appreciation in this world than for bread.

If we want a love message to be heard, it has got to be sent out. To keep a lamp burning, we have to keep putting oil in it.

On Life:

In light of heaven, the worst suffering earth, a life full of the most atrocious tortures earth, will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel.

The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.

Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody.

The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for and deserted by everybody

On Loyalty:

Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.

I do not pray for success, I ask for faithfulness.

Serve:

Good works are links that form a chain of love.

There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devoticome in — that we do it to God, to Christ, and that’s why we try to do it as beautifully as possible.

The miracle is not that we do this work, but that we are happy to do it.

Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself. Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them.

Get to know the poor in your country. Love them. Serve them.

If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.

It is a kingly act to assist the fallen.

It is not how much you do, but how much love you put into the doing that matters.

Let us not be satisfied with just giving money. Money is not enough, money can be got, but they need your hearts to love them. So, spread your love everywhere you go.

On Holiness:

Holiness is not the luxury of the few; it is a simply duty, for you and for me.

On Family:

Everybody today seems to be in such a terrible rush, anxious for greater developments and greater riches and so on, so that children have very little time for their parents. Parents have very little time for each other. And in the home, begins the disruptiof peace of the world.

On Kindness:

Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.

On Prayers:

Sweetest Lord, make me appreciative of the dignity of my high vocation, and its many responsibilities. Never permit me to disgrace it by giving way to coldness, unkindness, or impatience.

Abortion:

The greatest destroyer of peace is abortibecause if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.

How can there be too many children? That is like saying there are too many flowers.

On Peace:

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature — trees, flowers, grass — grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.

Jesus, I thank you and plead you raise up Many Teresa’s to serve this world and show your Love.

John Bunyan – Man who wrote Pilgrim's Progress

admin — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 01:06:40 +0000

John Bunyan

John Bunyan was born in November, 1628, at Elstow, England

Best Known As: Author of The Pilgrim’s Progress

John Bunyan’s 17th-century book The Pilgrim’s Progress is classic literature’s most famous Christian allegory. Bunyan grew up in a village outside Bedford, England, the son of a tinker (or brazier — a mender of metal household utensils). Initially he followed his father’s trade, but in the late 1640s a spiritual awakening caused Bunyan to give up his “ungodly” ways and become a devoted student of biblical scripture. By the end of the 1650s he was a popular preacher and prolific writer who used plain language to spell out a theology in the tradition of Martin Luther and John Calvin.

He spent the next twelve years in jail refusing to give up his freedom to preach the good news of Jesus Christ, which the Official church prohibited with out being Licensed, In prison he preached to inmates and wrote sermons, poems, essays and books. After his release he published the first of several editions of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), an allegory in which a character named Christian, an everyman character, is the protagonist of the allegory, which centers itself in his journey from his hometown, the “City of Destruction” (“this world”), to the “Celestial City” (“that which is to come”: Heaven) atop Mt. Zion. Christian finds himself weighed down by a great burden (sin), which comes from his reading a book (the Bible).

Bunyan’s other Famous books include

The Holy City (1665),
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666)
The Holy War (1682). (This book is about the war in our soul between Holiness and Sinful nature)

Famous Quotes of John Bunyan:

“Prayer will make a man cease from sin, or sin will entice a man to cease from prayer”

“Pray often; for prayer is a shield to the soul, a sacrifice to God, and a scourge for Satan”

“When you pray, rather let your heart be without words than your words without heart.”

“He who runs from God in the morning will scarcely find him the rest of the day”

“You can do more than pray, after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed”

“He that is down need fear no fall”

“You have chosen the roughest road, but it leads straight to the hilltops.”

“One leak will sink a ship: and one sin will destroy a sinner.”

“There was a castle called Doubting Castle, the owner whereof was Giant Despair.”

“Temptations, when we meet them at first, are as the lion that roared upon Samson; but if we overcome them, the next time we see them we shall find a nest of honey within them”

“If you have sinned, do not lie down without repentance; for the want of repentance after one has sinned makes the heart yet harder and harder”

“Sin is the dare of God’s justice, the rape of His mercy, the jeer of His patience, the slight of His power, and the contempt of His love”

“No child of God sins to that degree as to make himself incapable of forgiveness”

“I love to hear my Lord spoken of, and wherever I have seen the print of His shoe in the earth, there have I coveted to put mine also.”

“They are for religion when in rags and contempt, but I am for him when he walks in his golden slippers in the sunshine and with applause.”

“Words easy to be understood do often hit the mark; when high and learned ones do only pierce the air.”

Our Favorite:

“When you pray, rather let your heart be without words than your words without heart.”

What can we Learn Today:

God can use any one, He used this Tinker to write a book which still encourages millions to take this Journey to Heaven who were saved by the precious blood of Jesus Christ.

Martin Luther's Famous Quotes

admin — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:11:45 +0000

Martin Luther’s Famous Quotes:

Born: November 10, 1483

Died: February 18, 1546

About Him:

The Life of Martin Luther is one of the most fascinating stories in the history of Christianity. A man who longed to walk in the ways of the almighty God and his word rather than on the words of humans. One of the great reformers of the Church of God. Today he is a great example for people who want to show the way of our Lord to this generation.

“My conscience is captive to the Word of God, here I stand, I can do no other, God help me.”

“I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God’s hands that I still possess”

“Peace is more important than all justice; and peace was not made for the sake of justice, but justice for the sake of peace.”

“You are not only responsible for what you say, but also for what you do not say”

“All who call on God in true faith, earnestly from the heart, will certainly be heard, and will receive what they have asked and desired, although not in the hour or in the measure, or the very thing which they ask. Yet they will obtain something greater and more glorious than they had dared to ask.”

“Pray, and let God worry”

“Peace if possible, truth at all costs.”

“Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your God”

“If you are not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don’t want to go there”

“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”

“Faith is a living and unshakable confidence, a belief in the grace of God so assured that a man would die a thousand deaths for its sake”

“Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime”

“Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things we do not see.”

“The fewer the words, the better the prayer.”

“God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.”

“Reason is the enemy of faith”

“There is no justification without sanctification, no forgiveness without renewal of life, no real faith from which the fruits of new obedience do not grow.”

“Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own believing and his own dying.”

“It is pleasing to God whenever thou rejoices or laughest from the bottom of thy heart”

“Christians are rare people on earth.”

“Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.”

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