Samuel Rutherford Quotes

I was about to be a preacher, but I was a sinner.

To us sin has not become any less of a mystery or a pain.

We take nothing to the grave with us, but a good or evil conscience... It is true, terrors of conscience cast us down; and yet without terrors of conscience we cannot be raised up again.

I can't help it. I want to be a good Catholic, but I'm a hedonist.

A lot of Mexican Catholic dogma, the way it's taught, it's about existing in a state of grace, which I found impossible to reconcile with the much darker view of the world and myself, even as a child.

If self-absorption, vague yearnings, and a nagging sense of incompleteness are sins, then surely I will burn for all eternity, and I will save you a seat.

I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. ... Or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won't quite despair of me in the end.

The sinner is at the heart of Christianity. No one is as competent as the sinner in matters of Christianity. No one, except a saint.

When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.

Are we not also married to conscience which we would love to get rid of often enough since it is more bothersome than a man or a woman ever could become?

Heaven help me for the way I am, save me from these evil deeds before I get them done.

One can convert only a sinner, never a saint.

That was my nature - going from temptation after temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed.

I think I'll be going to Heaven, because I had good intentions. But my actions are another thing.

To pass from estrangement from God to be a son of God is the basic fact of conversion. That altered relationship with God gives you an altered relationship with yourself, with your brother man, with nature, with the universe.

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!

While I was in college becoming a good Catholic I was also becoming a writer - one haunted by Catholicism.

It's a very, very fascinating story for me, cause it's about a man who's been doing bad; bad things. And he's a father of four children in parochial school, he's a lieutenant of detectives, but he's in conflict with himself and with trying to do what's right.

There is nothing you can do to assuage your conscience when you commit sins. Crime is a spiritual assault on the soul.

We have peace with God as soon as we believe, but not always with ourselves. The pardon may be past the prince's hand and seal, and yet not put into the prisoner's hand.

I was being called to surrender the very citadel of my self. I was completely in the dark. I did not really know what repentance was or what I was required to repent of. It was indeed the turning point of my life.

One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.

The most momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

I hope in God, I pray on, and look yet for the answer. They are not converted yet, but they will be.

I was brought up a Catholic, so I take no pleasure in guilt.