Charles Spurgeon Quotes

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.

God wants to use you in spite of your weaknesses. Of God chose to use perfect people only, He’d have no one to use

I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.

If God only used perfect people, He would have no one to use.

The crisis of our prayer life is that our minds may be filled with ideas of God while our hearts remain far from him.

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.

This wasn't prayer anyway, it was just argument with the gods. Prayer, he suspected as he hoisted himself up and turned for the door, was putting one foot in front of the other. Moving all the same.

if you cannot but weep when your soul summons you to prayer, she should spur you again and yet again, though weeping, until you shall come laughing

God is using my struggle. My struggle is the answer to the prayer.

There are no perfect men of course, but some are more perfect than others, and we can use all of those we can get.

Deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie - I found that out.

I was almost persuaded to be a Christian. I thought I never again could be thoughtless and worldly. But I soon forgot my morning prayer or else it was irksome to me. One by one my old habits returned and I cared less for religion than ever.

Excess of trouble may, for a time, distract and overwhelm the soul. Our Lord himself seems to have experienced somewhat of this. Our prayers, perhaps, are never more acceptable, than when they are offered in broken accents, in sighs, and groans.

You have to decide to servant the gods of materialism all around us or the true and the living God.

I don't know what heavy penance could have come to mind that frequently I would not have gladly undertaken rather than recollect myself in the practice of prayer.

I look'd to Heav'n, and try'd to pray; But or ever a prayer had gusht, A wicked whisper came and made My heart as dry as dust.

That's why I like listening to Schubert while I'm driving. Like I said, it's because all his performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of - that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally I find that encouraging.

All men of goodwill have this in common - that our works put us to shame.

I'm addicted to perfection. Problem with my life is I was always also addicted to chaos. Perfect chaos.

I feel my griefs too, and there scarce is ground Upon my flesh t'inflict another wound. Yet dare I not complain, or wish for death With holy Paul; lest it be thought the breath Of discontent; or that these prayers be For weariness of life, not love of thee.

We have not strength enough to follow our reason so far as it would carry us.

Since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection. Yet they were accomplished, somehow, all the same.

Mind is locked in matter like the spirit Ariel in a cloven pine. Like Ariel, men struggle to escape the drag of the matter they inhabit, yet it is the spirit that they fear.

No one's perfect," I whisper. "It doesn't work that way. One bad thing goes away, and another bad thing replaces it." I traded cowardice for cruelty; I traded weakness for ferocity.