Quotes from John Calvin

It is not denied that there is room for improvement; but what I maintain is, that the nearer any one approaches in resemblance to God, the more does the image of God appear in him. That believers may attain to it, God assigns repentance as the goal towards which they must keep running during the whole course of their lives.

This far, indeed, we differ from each other, in that everyone appropriates to himself some peculiar error; but we are all alike in this, that we substitute monstrous fictions for the one living and true God.

But he immediately adds another clause, to teach us, that if anything in us tends to life, it is what the Spirit produces; for no spark of life proceeds from our flesh.

The reason for God's keeping some for himself and rejecting others is to be sought nowhere but in God himself.

The anger of God proceeds with a slow step to avenge itself, but that it compensates for its tardiness by the severity of its punishment.

when we are angered by the sins of   others, we should beware lest a temptation of an opposite kind should   take possession of our minds.

Those who see the nightly splendor of the moon are possessed by perverse ingratitude if they do not recognize the goodness of God.

To this it must be added that a sincere love of the law of God is a sure sign of our adoption because it is a work of the Spirit...

Who does not see that Paul descends from a general to a particular adoption, in order to teach us, that not all who occupy a place in the Church are to be accounted as true members of the Church?

From the power of God we are naturally led to consider his eternity since that from which all other things derive their origin must necessarily be selfexistent and eternal.

Men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God.

But be it so that public error must have a place in human society, still, in the kingdom of God, we must look and listen only to his eternal truth, against which no series of years, no custom, no conspiracy, can plead prescription.