Frederic William Farrar Quotes

I have but shadowed forth my intense longing to lose myself in the Eternal and become merely a lump of clay in the Potter's divine hands so that my service may become more certain because uninterrupted by the baser self in me.

All reform aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through us; in other words, to engage us to obey.

Fling away your soul once for all, your own small self; if you will find it again. Count not even on immortality.

Those who cross the sea, change sky, but not soul.

The full acting out of the self's surrender to God therefore demands pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination

Receive, Lord, all my liberty, my memory, my understanding and my whole will.

That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously; that for which Jesus gave himself to be crucified; the end that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes who have followed his steps, was to redeem us from a formal religion, and teach us to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul.

My soul is not a palace of the past.

Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new self in God.

The phrase, 'You must die before you die,' is found in most of the world religions. If you don't learn how to die early, you spend the rest of your life avoiding failure. When you can free your True Self, the whole spiritual life opens up.

To reach perfection, we must all pass, one by one, through the death of self-effacement.

Man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away. . . . A man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons hiom.

It is not what we do that matters, but what a sovereign God chooses to do through us. God doesn't want our success; He wants us. He doesn't demand our achievements; He demands our obedience. The Kingdom of God is a kingdom of paradox, where through the ugly defeat of a cross, a holy God is utterly glorified. Victory comes through defeat; healing through brokenness; finding self through losing self.

I don't have to explain or defend the will of God. My job is simply to obey it.

Faith is in the soul. Belief is thought. Faith is so rich. Faith gives me my spiritual self.

A pure heart is one that is unencumbered, unworried, uncommitted and which does not want its own way about anything but which, rather, is submerged in the loving will of God.

When He send, His messengers will go, His prophets will prophesy, though all the world should forbid them.

As love is the most noble and divine passion of the soul, so is it that to which we may justly attribute all the real satisfactions of life, and without it, man is unfinished, and unhappy.

Add to this occasional journeys, ministers’ meetings, etc., and you will rather wonder that I have any time, than that I have so little. I am not my own, nor would I choose for myself. Let God employ me where he thinks fit, and give me patience and discretion to fill up my station to his honour and glory.

Following Jesus means taking up one's own cross to accompany him on his path, an uncomfortable path that is not one of success or earthly glory, but which leads to true freedom, the freedom from selfishness and sin.

How does our will become sanctified? By conforming itself unreservedly to that of God.

"Our kingdom go" is the necessary and unavoidable corollary of 'Thy kingdom come.' For the more there is self, the less there is of God. The divine eternal fulness of life can be gained only by those who have deliberately lost the partial, separative life of craving and self-interest, of egocentric thinking, feeling, wishing, and acting.

Virtue is only a conflict by which we get the mastery of our failings; that, by which every man proves his peculiar power of understanding the will and spirit of God, is only a silent working of the inner man.

Authentic spirituality... does not render the self content, it renders it undone.

To speak about this universal force that will lead us beyond on the last horizon of our known self toward a wiser, more loving, more luminous states of being, we do not need to invent a new language. But we do need to listen to the old, the ancient one, not with our jaded minds, but with our awakened souls.