Frederick Douglass Quotes

Do you think that a man is renewed by God's Spirit, when except for a few religious phrases, and a little more outside respectability, he is just the old man, the same character at heart he ever was?

Let us pray God that He would root out of our hearts every thing of our own planting, and set out there, with His own hands, the tree of life, bearing all manner of fruits.

What the world needs today is neither a new order, a new education, a new system, a new society nor a new religion. The remedy lies in a mind and a heart filled with holiness.

Revolution is something that actually starts in individual hearts.

You have a mind. And you have other people. Start with those, and change the world.

Repentance is more than just sorrow for the past; repentance is a change of mind and heart, a new life of denying self and serving the Savior as king in self's place.

A true repentance shuns the evil itself, more than the external suffering or the shame.

Do not sit down and try to pump up repentance from the dry well of a corrupt nature. It is contrary to the laws of your mind to suppose that you can force your soul into that gracious state. Take your heart in prayer to Him who understands it and say, "Lord, cleanse it. Lord, renew it. Lord, work repentance in it." The more you try to produce penitent emotions in yourself, the more you will be disappointed. However, if you believingly think of Jesus dying for you, repentance will burst forth.

What good does it do me if Christ was born in Bethlehem once if he is not born again in my heart through faith?

Friends come back from their worship with a new sense of ordination, but not the ordination of human hands. Something has happened in the stillness that makes the heart more tender, more sensitive, more shocked by evil, more dedicated to ideals of life, and more eager to push back the skirts of darkness and to widen the area of light and love.

Be sure it is not for nothing that the Landlord has knit our hearts so closely to time and place – to one friend rather than another and one shire more that all the land.

A lot of people think that Christianity is you doing all the righteous things you hate and avoiding all the wicked things you love in order to go to Heaven. No, that's a lost man with religion. A Christian is a person whose heart has been changed; they have new affections.

The hearts of great men can be changed.

I meet millions who tell me that they feel demoralized by the decay around us. The hope that each of us has is not in who governs us, or what laws are passed... Our hope is in the power of God working in the hearts of people.

The temple in which the Lord Jesus delights most, is a broken and contrite heart, renewed by the Holy Spirit.

God takes that which is nothing and makes something out of it. When you become a Christian, you cannot patch your Christianity onto your old life. You are to start over. Accept God's call as a promotion. Burn the old bridges and fix it so you cannot go back ; then serve God with all your heart.

Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

Christianity is not a political theory. It is not even a cultural theory. It is, at its root, all about changing the heart of each man and woman, boy and girl, so that we begin to think God's thoughts and act in accordance with his character.

Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.

...once again we face a paradox, for it appears that softening your heart and gently tending its wounds will protect you from evil. Building a fortress and defending yourself behind it will only make you more vulnerable. Healing your own heart is the single most powerful thing you can do to change the world. Your own transformation will enable you to withdraw so completely from evil that you contribute to it by not one word, one thought, or one breath. This healing process is like recovering your soul.

When we have broken our god of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with His presence.

If untouchability lives, Hinduism perishes and even India perishes, but if untouchability is eradicated from the Hindu heart, root and branch, then Hinduism has a definite message for the world.

He can make the dry parched ground of my soul to become a pool and my thirsty barren heart as springs of water. Yes he can make this habitation of dragons this heart which is so full of abominable lusts and fiery temptations to be a place of bounty and fruitfulness unto Himself

Modern prophets say that our economics have failed us. No! It is not our economics which have failed; it is man who has failed-man who has forgotten God. Hence no manner of economic or political readjustment can possibly save our civilization; we can be saved only by a renovation of the inner man, only by a purging of our hearts and souls; for only by seeking first the Kingdom of God and His Justice will all these other things be added unto us.

By the help of the water of new birth, the stain of former years had been washed away, and a light from above, serene and pure, had been infused into my reconciled heart, — after that, by the agency of the Spirit breathed from heaven, a second birth had restored me to a new man.