Quotes from JC Ryle

Stop being so sure that you are always right, and others wrong. Don't trust your own opinion, when you find it contrary to that of older men, and especially to that of your own parents. Age gives experience, and therefore deserves respect.

True Christianity is not merely believing a certain set of dry abstract propositions: it is to live in daily personal communication with an actual living person - Jesus Christ.

So that the best believer, if he knows what he says, and says the truth, is but a sinner at the best.

In another letter he says: "A man may be constitutionally meek as the lamb, constitutionally kind as the spaniel, constitutionally cheerful as the lark, and constitutionally modest as the owl; but these things are not sanctification. No sweet, humble, heavenly tempers, no sanctifying graces, are found but from the cross.

Whenever a church keeps back Christ crucified, or puts anything whatever in that foremost place which Christ crucified should always have, from that moment a church ceases to be useful.

1.) To repent without despairing; (2.) To believe without being presumptuous; (3.) To rejoice without falling into levity; (4.) To be angry without sinning.

Some made it an excuse for not attending the church service on a Sunday morning, that they could not awake early enough to get their families ready. He provided for this also. Taking a bell in his hand, he set out every Sunday for some months at five in the morning, and went round the most distant parts of the parish inviting all the inhabitants to the house of God.

Rarely do we see a person so entirely taken up with spiritual matters, that attention to this world's affairs is made a secondary matter or postponed. And why is it so? Simply because true conversions to God are uncommon.

Here again is one grand element of a preacher's success. He must labour by all means to be understood. It was a wise saying of Archbishop Usher, "To make easy things seem hard is every man's work; but to make hard things easy is the work of a great preacher.

I'll praise my Maker while I've breath, And when my voice is lost in death, Praise shall employ my noblest powers; My days of praise shall ne'er be past, While life, and thought, and being last, Or immortality endures.

I want to know one thing,—the way to heaven—how to land safe on that happy shore. God himself has condescended to teach the way; for this very end he came from heaven. He hath written it down in a book. Oh, give me that book! At any price give me the book of God! I have it: here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be a man of one book.

There are Lutherans and Wesleyans in the present day, but there are no Whitefieldites. No! The great evangelist of last century was a simple, guileless man, who lived for one thing only, and that was to preach Christ.