Guyon Quotes

#1. Self-seeking is the gate by which a soul departs from peace; and total abandonment to the will of God, that by which it returns.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#2. My earnest wish is to paint in true colors the goodness of God to me, and the depth of my own ingratitude

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#3. All consolation that does not come from God is but desolation; when the soul has learned to receive no comfort but in God only, it has passed beyond the reach of desolation.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#4. Secrets of the incomprehensible wisdom of God, unknown to any besides Himself! Man, sprung up only of a few days, wants to penetrate, and to set bounds to it. Who is it that hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been His counselor?

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#5. There are two means by which we may be led into the higher forms of prayer. One is Meditation, the other is Meditative Reading.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#6. If knowing answers to life's questions is absolutely necessary to you, then forget the journey. You will never make it. For this is a journey of unknowables
of unanswered questions, enigmas, incomprehensibles, and most of all, things unfair.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#7. We must forget ourselves and all self-interest, and listen, and be attentive to God.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#8. If while reading, you feel yourself recollected, lay aside the book and remain in stillness; at all times read but little, and cease to read when you're thus internally attracted.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#9. O my God, how true it is that we may have of Thy gifts and yet may be full of ourselves!

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#10. Prayer is the key of perfection and of sovereign happiness; it is the efficacious means of getting rid of all vices and of acquiring all virtues; for the way to become perfect is to live in the presence of God.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#11. My soul was not only brought into harmony with itself and with God, but with God's providence. In the exercise of faith and love, I endured and performed whatever came in God's providence, in submission, in thankfulness, and silence.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#12. The devil is outrageous only against prayer, and those that exercise it; because he knows it is the true means of taking his prey from him.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#13. The soul should not be surprised at feeling itself unable to offer up to God such petitions as it had formally made with freedom and facility; for now the Spirit maketh intercession for it according to the will of God ("with sighs too deep for words" - Romans 8:26-27).

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#14. Surrender yourselves then to be led and disposed of just as God pleases, with respect both to your outward and inward state.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#15. Let no one ask a stronger mark of an excellent love to God, than that we are insensible to our own reputation.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#16. We never know how strongly we cling to objects until they are taken away, and he who thinks htat he is attached to nothing, is frequently grandly mistaken, being bound to a thousand things, unknown to himself.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#17. It is a great truth, wonderful as it is undeniable, that all our happiness temporal, spiritual, and eternal consists in one thing; namely, in resigning ourselves to God, and in leaving ourselves with Him, to do with us and in us just as He pleases.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#18. He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? (Romans 8:32).

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#19. God causes us to promise in time of peace what He exacts from us in time of war; He enables us to make our abandonments in joy, but He requires the fulfilment of them in the midst of much bitterness.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#20. To rob God of nothing; to refuse Him nothing; to require of Him nothing; this is great perfection.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#21. I have never found any who prayed so well as those who had never been taught how. They who have no master in man, have one in the Holy Spirit.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#22. Ah, if you knew what peace there is in an accepted sorrow!

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#23. Oh, that we fully understood how very opposite our self-righteousness is to the designs of God!

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#24. It is only by a total death to self we can be lost in God.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#25. Be patient in prayer, even though you should do nothing all your life but wait in patience, with a heart humbled, abandoned, resigned, and content for the return of your Beloved. Oh, excellent prayer! How it moves the heart of God, and obliges Him to return more than anything else!

Madame Guyon

#26. The more wants we have, the further we are from God, and the nearer we approach him, the better can we dispense with everything that is not Himself.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#27. He who has a pure heart will never cease to pray; and he who will be constant in prayer, shall know what it is to have a pure heart.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#28. He destroys that he might build; for when He is about to rear His sacred temple in us, He first totally razes that vain and pompous edifice, which human art and power had erected, and from its horrible ruins a new structure is formed, by His power only.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#29. To have time for it, I left off prayer which was to me the first inlet of evils.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#30. The very discovery of these hidden things is in itself a purifying experience! The soul needs to discover what is inside. The self nature needs to see what it really is, and what it is like-right to the very bottom.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#31. It is the fire of suffering that brings forth the gold of godliness.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#32. A person truly humbled permits not anything to put him in a rage. As it is pride which dies the last in the soul, so it is passion which is last destroyed in the outward conduct. A soul thoroughly dead to itself, finds nothing of rage left.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#33. This spirit gradually decayed, not being nourished by prayer. I became cold toward God.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#34. God's designs regarding you, and His methods of bringing about these designs, are infinitely wise.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#35. We should accept indiscriminately all His dispensations, whether obscurity or illumination, fruitfulness or barrenness, weakness or strength, sweetness or bitterness, temptations, distractions, pain, weariness, or doubtings; and none of all these should, for one moment retard our course.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#36. Our activity should consist in placing ourselves in a state of susceptibility to Divine impressions, and pliability to all the operations of the Eternal Word.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon