Top 85 Frederick William Robertson Quotes
#1. The true aim of everyone who aspires to be a teacher should be, not to impart his own opinions, but to kindle minds.
Frederick William Robertson
#2. It is not in understanding a set of doctrines; not in outward comprehension of the "scheme of salvation," that rest and peace are to be found, but in taking up, in all lowliness and meekness, the yoke of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Frederick William Robertson
#5. Never does a man know the force that is in him till some mighty affliction or grief has humanized the soul.
Frederick William Robertson
#6. Christ's miracles were vivid manifestations to the senses that He is the Saviour of the body
and now as then the issues of life and death are in His hands
that our daily existence is a perpetual miracle. The extraordinary was simply a manifestation of God's power in the ordinary.
Frederick William Robertson
#8. What we are, and where we are, is God's providential arrangement ... and the manly and wise way is to look your disadvantages in the face, and see what can be made of them.
Frederick William Robertson
#10. False notions of liberty are strangely common. People talk of it as if it meant the liberty of doing whatever one likes - whereas the only liberty that a man, worthy of the name of man, ought to ask for, is, to have all restrictions, inward and outward, removed that prevent his doing what he ought.
Frederick William Robertson
#11. In God's world, for those who are in earnest, there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain.
Frederick William Robertson
#13. The charm of the words of great men, those grand sayings which are recognized as true as soon as heard, is this, that you recognize them as wisdom which has passed across your own mind. You feel that they are your own thoughts come back to you ...
Frederick William Robertson
#14. Only what coronation is in an earthly way, baptism is in a heavenly way; God's authoritative declaration in material form of a spiritual reality.
Frederick William Robertson
#16. Sow the seeds of life - humbleness, pure-heartedness, love; and in the long eternity which lies before the soul, every minutest grain will come up again with an increase of thirty, sixty, or a hundred fold.
Frederick William Robertson
#17. That prayer which does not succeed in moderating our wishes
in changing the passionate desire into still submission, the anxious, tumultuous expectation into silent surrender
is no true prayer, and proves that we have not the spirit of true prayer.
Frederick William Robertson
#18. Humility is that simple, inner life of real greatness, which is indifferent to magnificence, and, surrounded by it all, lives far away in the distant country of a Father's home, with the cross borne silently and self-sacrificingly in the heart of hearts.
Frederick William Robertson
#19. This is the ministry and its work
not to drill hearts and minds and consciences into right forms of thought and mental postures, but to guide to the living God who speaks.
Frederick William Robertson
#21. To believe is to be happy; to doubt is to be wretched. To believe is to be strong. Doubt cramps energy. Belief is power. Only so far as a man believes strongly, mightily, can he act cheerfully, or do any thing that is worth the doing.
Frederick William Robertson
#22. He who, with strong passions, remains chaste
he who, keenly sensitive, with manly power of indignation in him, can yet restrain himself and forgive
these are strong men, spiritual heroes.
Frederick William Robertson
#23. God's highest gifts
talent, beauty, feeling, imagination, power
they carry with them the possibility of the highest heaven and the lowest hell. Be sure that it is by that which is highest in you that you may be lost.
Frederick William Robertson
#24. Religious controversy does only harm. It destroys humble inquiry after truth, and throws all the energies into an attempt to prove ourselves right-a spirit in which no man gets at truth.
Frederick William Robertson
#25. God's truth is too sacred to be expounded to superficial worldliness in its transient fit of earnestness.
Frederick William Robertson
#27. There is rest in this world nowhere except in Christ, the manifested love of God. Trust in excellence, and the better you become, the keener is the feeling of deficiency. Wrap up all in doubt, and there is a stern voice that will thunder at last out of the wilderness upon your dream.
Frederick William Robertson
#28. It is more true to say that our opinions depend upon our lives and habits, than to say that our lives and habits depend on our opinions.
Frederick William Robertson
#29. What the world calls virtue is a name and a dream without Christ. The foundation of all human excellence must be laid deep in the blood of the Redeemer's cross, and in the power of His resurrection.
Frederick William Robertson
#30. A happy home is the single spot of rest which a man has upon this earth for the cultivation of his noblest sensibilities.
Frederick William Robertson
#31. Instruction ends in the schoolroom, but education ends only with life. A child is given to the universe to be educated.
Frederick William Robertson
#32. This world is given as the prize for the men in earnest; and that which is true of this world, is truer still of the world to come.
Frederick William Robertson
#33. Only in the sacredness of inward silence does the soul truly meet the secret, hiding God. The strength of resolve, which afterward shapes life, and mixes itself with action, is the fruit of those sacred, solitary moments. There is a divine depth in silence. We meet God alone.
Frederick William Robertson
#34. It is not the number of books you read, nor the variety of sermons you hear, but it is the frequency and earnestness with which you meditate on these things till the truth in them becomes your own and part of your being, that insures your growth.
Frederick William Robertson
#35. On earth we have nothing to do with success or results, but only with being true to God, and for God. Defeat in doing right is nevertheless victory.
Frederick William Robertson
#36. Let a man begin in earnest with "I ought," and he will end, by God's grace, if he persevere, with "I will." Let him force himself to abound in all small offices of kindliness, attention, affectionateness, and all these for God's sake. By and by he will feel them become the habit of his soul.
Frederick William Robertson
#39. Life, like war, is a series of mistakes,he is the best who wins the most splendid victories by the retrieval of mistakes. Forget mistakes: organize victory out of mistakes.
Frederick William Robertson
#40. Men ... are bettered and improved by trial, and refined out of broken hopes and blighted expectations.
Frederick William Robertson
#41. A silent man is easily reputed wise. A man who suffers none to see him in the common jostle and undress of life, easily gathers round him a mysterious veil of unknown sanctity, and men honor him for a saint. The unknown is always wonderful.
Frederick William Robertson
#43. What we mean by sentimentalism is that state in which a man speaks deep and true sentiments not because he feels them strongly, but because he perceives that they are beautiful, and that it is touching and fine to say them,-things which he fain would feel, and fancies that he does feel.
Frederick William Robertson
#44. We are too much haunted by ourselves, projecting the central shadow of self on everything around us. And then comes the Gospel to rescue us from this selfishness. Redemption is this, to forget self in God.
Frederick William Robertson
#45. However dark and profitless, however painful and weary, existence may have become, life is not done, and our Christian character is not won, so long as God has anything left for us to suffer, or anything left for us to do.
Frederick William Robertson
#48. There is a mighty gulf between those who love and those who do not love God To the one class we owe civility, courtesy, kindness, even tenderness. It is only those who love the Lord who should find in our hearts a home.
Frederick William Robertson
#50. I will tell you what to hate. Hate hypocrisy, hate cant, hate indolence, oppression, injustice; hate Pharisaism; hate them as Christ hated them with a deep, living, godlike hatred.
Frederick William Robertson
#52. The one who will be found in trial capable of great acts of love is ever the one who is always doing considerate small ones.
Frederick William Robertson
#53. Marriage is not a union merely between two creatures - it is a union between two spirits; and the intention of that bond is to perfect the nature of both.
Frederick William Robertson
#54. You reap what you sow - not something else, but that. An act of love makes the soul more loving. A deed of humbleness deepens humbleness. The thing reaped is the very thing sown, multiplied a hundred fold. You have sown a seed of life, you reap life everlasting.
Frederick William Robertson
#55. Two thousand years ago there was One here on this earth who lived the grandest life that ever has been lived yet - a life that every thinking man, with deeper or shallower meaning, has agreed to call divine.
Frederick William Robertson
#56. Simpler manners, purer lives; more self-denial; more earnest sympathy with the classes that lie below us, nothing short of that can lay the foundations of the Christianity which is to be hereafter, deep and broad.
Frederick William Robertson
#57. The mistake we make is to look for a source of comfort in ourselves: self-contemplation, instead of gazing upon God. In other words, we look for comfort precisely where comfort never can be.
Frederick William Robertson
#58. There is a two-fold solemnity which belongs to the dying hour-it is the winding up of life, and it is the commencement of eternity.
Frederick William Robertson
#59. Heaven begun is the living proof that makes the heaven to come credible. Christ in you is "the hope of glory." It is the eagle eye of faith which penetrates the grave, and sees far into the tranquil things of death. He alone can believe in immortality who feels the resurrection in him already.
Frederick William Robertson
#60. God's justice and love are one. Infinite justice must be infinite love. Justice is but another sign of love.
Frederick William Robertson
#63. Only so far as a man believes strongly, mightily, can he act cheerfully, or do anything that is worth doing.
Frederick William Robertson
#65. Kindly words, sympathizing attentions, watchfulness against wounding men's sensitiveness-these cost very little, but they are priceless in their value.
Frederick William Robertson
#67. If you think that you can sin, and then by cries avert the consequences of sin, you insult God's character.
Frederick William Robertson
#68. Tell men that God is love; that right is right, and wrong, wrong; let them cease to admire philanthropy, and begin to love men; cease to pant for heaven, and begin to love God; then the spirit of liberty begins.
Frederick William Robertson
#69. It was necessary for the Son to disappear as an outward authority, in order that He might reappear as an inward principle of life. Our salvation is no longer God manifested in a Christ without us, but as a Christ within us, the hope of glory.
Frederick William Robertson
#70. I read hard, or not at all; never skimming, never turning aside to merely inciting books; and Plato, Aristotle, Butler, Thucydides, Sterne, Jonathan Edwards, have passed like the iron atoms of the blood into my mental constitution.
Frederick William Robertson
#71. Every unfulfilled aspiration of humanity in the past; all partial representation of perfect character; all sacrifices, nay, even those of idolatry, point to the fulfillment of what want, the answer to every longing
the type of perfect humanity, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Frederick William Robertson
#73. It is not by change of circumstances, but by fitting our spirits to the circumstances in which God has placed us, that we can be reconciled to life and duty.
Frederick William Robertson
#74. The Divine wisdom has given us prayer, not as a means whereby to obtain the good things of earth, but as a means whereby we learn to do without them; not as a means whereby we escape evil, but as a means whereby we become strong to meet it.
Frederick William Robertson
#75. This is the true liberty of Christ, when a free man binds himself in love to duty. Not in shrinking from our distasteful occupations, but in fulfilling them, do we realize our high origin.
Frederick William Robertson
#76. Brethren, happiness is not our being's end and aim. The Christian's aim is perfection, not happiness; and every one of the sons of God must have something of that spirit which marked his Master.
Frederick William Robertson
#78. If the duties before us be not noble, let us ennoble them by doing them in a noble spirit; we become reconciled to life if we live in the spirit of Him who reconciled the life of God with the lowly duties of servants.
Frederick William Robertson
#79. In these two things the greatness of man consists, to have God dwelling in us as to impart His character to us, and to have Him dwelling in us, that we recognize His presence, and know that we are His, and He is ours. The one is salvation; the other, the assurance of it.
Frederick William Robertson
#80. A heart renewed
a loving heart
a penitent and humble heart
a heart broken and contrite, purified by love
that and only that is the rest of men. Spotlessness may do for angels, repentance unto life is the highest that belongs to man.
Frederick William Robertson
#81. Do you want to learn holiness with terrible struggles and sore affliction and the plague of much remaining evil? Then wait before you turn to God.
Frederick William Robertson
#82. Child of God, if you would have your thought of God something beyond a cold feeling of His presence, let faith appropriate Christ.
Frederick William Robertson
#85. In all matters of eternal truth, the soul is before the intellect; the things of God are spiritually discerned. You know truth by being true; you recognize God by being like Him.
Frederick William Robertson