Quotes from Martin Luther

Behold, from faith thus flow forth love and joy in the Lord, and from love a joyful, willing, and free mind that serves ones neighbor willingly and takes no account of gratitude or ingratitude, of praise or blame, of gain or loss.

God creates out of nothing. Therefore, until a man is nothing, God can make nothing out of him.

God created us just in order to redeem us.. . .

The vanity and insatiability of the human heart are unspeakable. What a man has does not please him; what he does not have, that he yearns for.

Let us learn, then, to despise the threats and cruel plans of our enemies and conclude for certain that God in the heavens has decided on quite different things and is already laughing at them but playing with us so that He may prove our faith and hope and discipline us.

For "no one has ascended into heaven but He who descended" (John 3:13), that is, no one arrives at the understanding of divinity but he who has first been humbled and who has come down to an understanding of himself, for there he discovers the understanding of God at the same time.

The rabbis have written that when the earth had opened up and consumed Korah with the rest, his sons had by an apparent miracle stood firm above the abyss as though suspended in the air, because they would not depart from the tabernacle, but had admonished their father and his followers to desist from error.

And this is the pure and unalloyed meaning of the First Commandment: We should deem ourselves to be nothing as regards our merit, but to have, receive, and find power to do everything only by His mercy and love, to His glory — mercy which He first promises by His Word and then also confirms afterward by a work which He does through us, as by a sign, just as here He cites the Exodus from Egypt and the destruction of the Canaanites.

No one should be deceived by the glamor of the ceremonies and entangled in the multitude of pompous forms, and thus lose the simplicity of the mass itself

It is far better to bear the contempt and hatred of adversaries than to fall into reproach and into the snare of the devil, as Paul says in 1 Tim. 3:7. The

So if you wish to rejoice in Christ, for His sake you must bear sorrow, confusion, inward and outward vexations. The reason is that you cannot hold to Christ without offending the prince of the world. You cannot hold fast to the God of life without rousing against yourself the author of death.

In the opinion of those delicate-eared persons, nothing could be more bitter or intemperate than Paul's language.