Brother Lawrence Quotes

My service to humanity is my real opportunity to prove my genuine love for God and God alone.

Having found in many books different methods of going to GOD, and divers practices of the spiritual life, I thought this would serve rather to puzzle me than facilitate what I sought after, which was nothing but how to become wholly GOD'S. This made me resolve to give the all for the all; so after having given myself wholly to GOD, that He might take away my sin, I renounced, for the love of Him, everything that was not He; and I began to live as if there was none but He and I in the world.

God gave Himself to you: give yourself to God.

I no longer desire anything but to be Thine.

Loneliness is the fundamental force that urgees mystics to a deeper union with God... An experience of God quenches this thirst for the absolute but at the same time, paradoxiacally, whets it, because this is an experience that can never be total; by necessity, the knowledge of God is always partial. So loneliness opens up mystics to a desire to love each other and every human being as God loves them.

Let me forget the world and be swallowed up in the desire to glorify God.

I am an emptiness for Thee to fill; my soul a cavern for Thy sea

The deepest desire of our hearts is for union for God. God created us for union with himself. This is the original purpose of our lives.

There is but one way in which God should be loved, and that is to take no step except with Him and for Him, and to follow with a generous self-abandonment every thing which He requires.

Only the hopeless love God.

He (Job) did not seek the Giver because of His gifts; when all gifts were removed he still sought the Giver.

I receive Thee ransom of my soul. For love of Thee have I studied and kept vigil toiled preached and taught.

It is our duty and our privilege to exhaust our lives for Jesus. We are not to be living specimens of men in fine preservation, but living sacrifices, whose lot is to be consumed

Jesus has to be and become ever more the center of my life. It is not enough that Jesus is my teacher, my guide, my source of inspiration. It is not even enough that he is my companion on they journey, my friend and my brother. Jesus must become the heart of my heart, the fire of my life, the love of my soul, the bridegroom of my spirit. He must become my only thought, my only concern, my only desire.

Sacrifice is the first element of religion, and resolves itself in theological language into the love of God.

God is infinite and without end, but the soul's desire is an abyss which cannot be filled except by a Good which is infinite; and the more ardently the soul longeth after God, the more she wills to long after him; for God is a Good without drawback, and a well of living water without bottom, and the soul is made in the image of God, and therefore it is created to know and love God.

Charity even for one person does not make sense except in terms of an effort to love all Creation in response to the Creator's love for it.

I doubt God keeps track of how many arguments we win; God may indeed keep track of how well we love.

If our prayer is “Dear God, please use me to be of service,” then that is what we will be. And it is not for us to judge either the size or value of our gifts. Our job is to try to get out of the way, to defer to the spirit moving within us and become open channels for the flow of God’s love.

Oh! it is sweet to be thus weaned from friends, and from myself, and dead to the present world, that so I may live wholly to and upon the blessed God!

I never made a sacrifice. Of this we ought not to talk when we remember the great sacrifice which he made who left His Father's throne on high to give Himself for us.

The first thing a man must do if he desires to be used in the Lord's work, is to make an unconditional surrender of himself to God.

Let a man set his heart only on doing the will of God and he is instantly free. If we understand our first and sole duty to consist of loving God supremely and loving everyone, even our enemies, for God's dear sake, then we can enjoy spiritual tranquility under every circumstance.

God wants your life. Not one hour a week, not 10% of your income, He wants you.

The person who loves his life will lose it: it could not be otherwise, for to love one's life is a fundamental denial of God's sovereignty, of God's rights, and a brazen elevation of self to the apogee of one's perception, and therefore an idolatrous focus on self, which is the heart of all sin