Calvin Quotes

I’m teaching tonight at St. Paul’s Theological Center on John Calvin.  I’ve had fun preparing for the talk.  Here are some great quotes I’ve come across:

“There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.”

“Seeing that a Pilot steers the ship in which we sail, who will never allow us to perish even in the midst of shipwrecks, there is no reason why our minds should be overwhelmed with fear and overcome with weariness.”

“There is no worse screen to block out the Spirit than confidence in our own intelligence.”

“You must submit to supreme suffering in order to discover the completion of joy.”

“We must remember that Satan has his miracles, too.”

“Knowledge of the sciences is so much smoke apart from the heavenly science of Christ.”

“It behooves us to accomplish what God requires of us, even when we are in the greatest despair respecting the results.”

“God tolerates even our stammering, and pardons our ignorance whenever something inadvertently escapes us – as, indeed, without this mercy there would be no freedom to pray.”

“However many blessings we expect from God, His infinite liberality will always exceed all our wishes and our thoughts.”

“For there is no one so great or mighty that he can avoid the misery that will rise up against him when he resists and strives against God.”

“All the blessings we enjoy are Divine deposits, committed to our trust on this condition, that they should be dispensed for the benefit of our neighbors.”

“Wherever we find the Word of God surely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there, it is not to be doubted, is a church of God.”

“Every one of us is, even from his mother’s womb, a master craftsman of idols.”

“No man is excluded from calling upon God, the gate of salvation is set open unto all men: neither is there any other thing which keepeth us back from entering in, save only our own unbelief.”

“Is it faith to understand nothing, and merely submit your convictions implicitly to the Church?”

“I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels.”

“Man with all his shrewdness is as stupid about understanding by himself the mysteries of God, as an ass is incapable of understanding musical harmony.”

“Let us not cease to do the utmost, that we may incessantly go forward in the way of the Lord; and let us not despair of the smallness of our accomplishments.”

“Though Satan instills his poison, and fans the flames of our corrupt desires within us,we are yet not carried by any external force to the commission of sin, but our own flesh entices us, and we willingly yield to its allurements.”

“The torture of a bad conscience is the hell of a living soul.”

“Original sin, therefore, appears to be a hereditary, depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused through all the parts of the soul, rendering us obnoxious to the divine wrath and producing in us those works which the scripture calls ‘works of.”

“Augustine does not disagree with this when he teaches that it is a faculty of the reason and the will to choose good with the assistance of grace; evil, when grace is absent.”

“For though we very truly hear that the kingdom of God will be filled with splendor, joy, happiness and glory, yet when these things are spoken of, they remain utterly remote from our perception, and as it were, wrapped in obscurities, until that day.”

“Man’s mind is like a store of idolatry and superstition; so much so that if a man believes his own mind it is certain that he will forsake God and forge some idol in his own brain.”

“Each eye can have its vision separately; but when we are looking at anything . . . our vision, which in itself is divided, joins up and unites in order to give itself as a whole to the object that is put before it.”

“Hence that dread and amazement with which as Scripture uniformly relates holy men were struck and overwhelmed whenever they beheld the presence of God. Men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance until they have.”

“There is no work, however vile or sordid, that does not glisten before God.”

“[A]ll men were created to busy themselves with labor for the common good.”

“A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God’s truth is attacked and yet would remain silent.”