Ignatius of Antioch Quotes

Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience.

Deep down, I know that I am a child of God who has inherited divine capacities; some of them I strive to develop, others are left languishing. I also have a human side. I lose my temper, lose patience and sometimes judge others and myself.

Judge yourself; if you do that you will not be judged by God, as St. Paul says. But it must be a real sense of your own sinfulness, not an artificial humility.

I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.

I hate how hard spiritual transformation is and how long it takes. I hate thinking about how many people have gone to church for decades and remain joyless or judgmental or bitter or superior.

With this sweet hope of ultimate acceptance with God, I have always enjoyed much cheerfulness before men; but I have at the same time laboured incessantly to cultivate the deepest humiliation before God.

The presence of any humility in my life is purely and completely an evidence of God's grace. From my perspective, I am not a humble man. I am a proud man pursuing humility by the grace of God.

If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.

Little by little he came to recognize the difference between the spirits that agitated him, one from the enemy and one from God.

I'm a sinner just like everybody else and I have my faults and I've been through my dark times in my life to where I wasn't walking the walk and talking the talk, or I may have been talking the talk, but I wasn't walking the walk.

It is a most delightful reflection that if I come to the throne of God in prayer, I may feel a thousand defects, but yet there is hope. I usually feel more dissatisfied with my prayers than with anything else I do.

Sometimes when, you know, God tries to correct you in private and if you don't catch it he'll correct you in public.

Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying.

Our sin is exactly the presumption that we can know God or ourselves through our own capacities.

I always believed in God and Christ, but I was in rebellion - trying to make my relationship with God fit into my life instead of making my life fit in with him. I was stubborn.

An humble knowledge of thyself is a surer way to God than a deep search after learning.

Most of the characters I write with don't think an awful lot about their faith. They're not always questioning the church or feeling confined by the church or rebelling against the church.

If I cannot add to my own low level of understanding, I could ill afford to try to raise that of others, seeing that it belongs to our Creator and Lord to give much or little.

If we continue to seek learning to serve God and His children better, it is a blessing of great worth. If we begin to seek learning to exalt ourselves alone, it leads to selfishness and pride, which will take us away from eternal life.

The Lord knows who we really are, what we really think, what we really do, and who we really are becoming.

If America is too arrogant, too prideful to repent, it's not the kind of country that God wants it to be.

It is true that I have been studying both humility and pride for many years for the purpose of weakening pride in my own life and cultivating humility by the grace of God.

When it comes to spiritual truth, how can we know that we are on the right path? One way is by asking the right questions - the kind that help us ponder our progress and evaluate how things are working for us.

It is my meditation all the day, and more than my meat and drink, to know how I shall make the Saints of God comprehend the visions that roll like an overflowing surge before my mind.

Cure yourself of the affliction of caring how you appear to others. Concern yourself only with how you appear before God, concern yourself only with the idea that God may have of you.