Benjamin Franklin Quotes

Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.

If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.

The wicked fear the good, because the good are a constant reproach to their consciences. The ungodly like religion in the same way that they like lions, either dead or behind bars; they fear religion when it breaks loose and begins to challenge their consciences.

Temptations make one very censorious. If you are virtuous you condemn the wicked and if you are wicked, you condemn the virtuous.

Society is composed of slow Christians and wide-awake sinners.

If your religion does not make you holy, it will damn you. It is simply painted pageantry to go to hell in.

I think some people who say they're not Christians can behave in a more godly fashion than people who call themselves Christians.

I do think that a minister who can preach a sermon without addressing sinners does not know how to preach.

Almost everyone thinks they are a good person, but the question you should be asking is, am I good enough to go to Heaven? How would you know?

You've got to walk and talk with God to go to heaven... I have the devil in me! If I didn't have, I'd be Christian!

If there is a heaven, I don't know anything else I can do to get there - and neither do you.

It is here, my daughters, that love is to be found - not hidden away in corners but in the midst of occasions of sin. And believe me, although we may more often fail and commit small lapses, our gain will be incomparably the greater.

I come now to tell you for what I am brought here to die, and to give you an account of my faith, which I shall do as in the sight of the living God before whom I am shortly to stand.

I will be guided by the Christian ethic and an awareness that human action is by nature transient.

If you do not accuse each other, God will not accuse you. If you have no accuser you will enter heaven. What many people call sin is not sin; I do many things to break down superstition, and I will break it down.

Die, v.: To stop sinning suddenly.

As much as we can, let's defend the truth by pointing to what the apostles taught, and let's call out sin by pointing to the inconsistencies between what we say we believe and what we do.

My ultimate goal is to become a saint.

His faith perhaps in some nice tenets might be wrong; his life, I'm sure, was always in the right.

They do not walk in... the path of Christ.

The Bible makes it clear that self-righteousness is the premier enemy of the Gospel.

And because we are, somehow, better than they, we get to go to heaven and they don't. Christians will tell you outright that they believe that.

Many a thief is a better man than many a clergyman, and miles nearer to the gate of the kingdom.

The Jesus of the Scripture transcends all nations and calls all nations into judgment.

I'm very careful about saying who would and wouldn't go to heaven. I don't know.