Thomas Chalmers Quotations

But a blank he cannot be: there are no moral blanks; there are no neutral characters.

The public! the public! how many fools does it require to make the public?

The best way to overcome the world is not with morality or self-discipline. Christians overcome the world by seeing the beauty and excellence of Christ. They overcome the world by seeing something more attractive than the world: Christ

Such is the grasping tendency of the human heart, that it must have a something to lay hold of—and which, if wrested away without the substitution of another something in its place, would leave a void and a vacancy as painful to the mind, as hunger is to the natural system…. The heart must have something to cling to…

The heart is not so constituted, and the only way to dispossess it of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one

Every man is a missionary, now and forever, for good or for evil, whether he intends or designs it or not.

Faith is like the hand of the beggar that takes the gift while adding nothing to it.

Write your name in kindness, love and mercy on the hearts of the thousands you come in contact with year by year, and you will never be forgotten.

I want to feel my own nothingness, I want to give myself up in absolute resignation to God, to lie prostrate and passive at His feet, with no other disposition in my heart than that of merging my will into His will, and no other language in my mouth than that of prayer for the perfecting of His strength in my weakness.

A man's needs are few. The simpler the life, therefore, the better. Indeed, only three things are truly necessary in order to make life happy: the blessing of God, the benefit of books, and the benevolence of friends.

Thousands of men breathe, move, and live; pass off the stage of life and are heard of no more. Why? They did not a particle of good in the world; and none were blest by them, none could point to them as the instrument of their redemption; not a line they wrote, not a word they spoke, could be recalled, and so they perished--their light went out in darkness, and they were not remembered more than the insects of yesterday. Will you thus live and die, O man immortal? Live for something.

It is in those times of hopeless chaos when the sovereign hand of God is most likely to be seen.

Guard against that vanity which courts a compliment, or is fed by it.

Prayer does not enable us to do a greater work for God. Prayer is a greater work for God.

It is not scholarship alone, but scholarship impregnated with religion, that tells on the great mass of society. We have no faith in the efficacy of mechanic's institutes, or even of primary and elementary schools, for building up a virtuous and well conditioned peasantry, so long as they stand dissevered from the lessons of Christian piety.

I take one decisive and immediate step, and resign my all to the sufficiency of my Saviour.

Regardless of how large, your vision is too small.

I feel my disease, and I feel that my want of alarm and lively affecting conviction forms its most obstinate ingredient; I try to stir up the emotion, and feel myself harassed and distressed at the impotency of my own meditations. But why linger without the threshold in the face of a warm and urgent invitation? "Come unto me." Do not think it is your office to heal one part of the disease, and Christ's to heal the remainder.

Not till we come to a simple reliance on the blood and mediation of the Saviour, shall we know what it is either to have trust in God, or know what it is to walk before Him without fear, in righteousness and true holiness.

The sum and substance of the preparation needed for a coming eternity is that you believe what the Bible tells you, and do what the Bible bids you.

The Bible is like a wide and beautiful landscape seen afar off, dim and confused; but a good telescope will bring it near, and spread out all its rocks and trees and flowers and v__ulant fields and winding rivers at one's very feet. That telescope is the Spirit's teaching.

Acts of virtue ripen into habits; and the goodly and permanent result is the formation or establishment of a virtuous character.

The human mind feels restless and dissatisfied under the anxieties of ignorance. It longs for the repose of conviction; and to gain this repose it will often rather precipitate its conclusions than wait for the tardy lights of observation and experiment. There is such a thing, too, as the love of simplicity and system,--a prejudice of the understanding which disposes it to include all the phenomena of nature under a few sweeping generalities,--an indolence which loves to repose on the beauties of a theory rather than encounter the fatiguing detail of its evidences.

If it be the characteristic of a worldly man that he desecrates what is holy, it should be of the Christian to consecrate what is secular, and to recognize a present and presiding divinity in all things.

The character wherewith we sink into the grave at death is the very character wherewith we shall reappear at the resurrection.

The brute animals have all the same sensations of pain as human beings, and consequently endure as much pain when their body is hurt; but in their case the cruelty of torment is greater, because they have no mind to bear them up against their sufferings, and no hope to look forward to when enduring the last extreme pain.

In the wildest anarchy of man's insurgent appetites and sins there is still a reclaiming voice,--a voice which, even when in practice disregarded, it is impossible not to own; and to which, at the very moment that we refuse our obedience, we find that we cannot refuse the homage of what ourselves do feel and acknowledge to be the best, the highest principles of our nature.

O Heavenly Father, convert my religion from a name to a principle! Bring all my thoughts and movements into an habitual reference to Thee!

Shakespeare is an intellectual miracle.

Infidelity gives nothing in return for what it takes away. What, then, is it worth? Everything valuable as a compensating power. Not a blade of grass that withers, or the ugliest weed that is flung away to rot and die, but reproduces something.

Infidelity is one of those coinages,-a mass of base money that won't pass current with any heart that loves truly, or any head that thinks correctly. And infidels are poor sad creatures; they carry about them a load of dejection and desolation, not the less heavy that it is invisible. It is the fearful blindness of the soul.

There are no moral blanks; there are no neutral characters.

... moral evil is its own curse.

O God, impress upon me the value of time, and give regulation to all my thoughts and to all my movements.

The public! why, the public's nothing better than a great baby.

Enthusiasm is a virtue rarely to be met with in seasons of calm and unruffled prosperity.

It is more blessed to give than to receive, and therefore less blessed to receive than to give.

It has been said that there is nothing more uncommon than common sense.

Even in the fiercest uproar of our stormy passions, conscience, though in her softest whispers, gives to the supremacy of rectitude the voice of an undying testimony.

By the very constitution of our nature moral evil is its own curse.

With the magnificence of eternity before us, let time, with all its fluctuations, dwindle into its own littleness.

Judging from the tendency and effect of his arguments, an atheist does not appear positively to refuse that a God may be... His verdict on the doctrine of God is only that it is not proven. It is not that it is disproven. He is but an atheist. He is not an anti-theist.

Christ came to give us a justifying righteousness, and He also came to make us holy — not chiefly for the purpose of evidencing here our possession of a justifying righteousness — but for the purpose of forming and fitting us for a blessed eternity.

I have no sympathy whatever with those who would grudge our workmen and our common people the very highest acquisitions which their taste or their time or their inclination would lead them to realize.