Quotes from John Calvin

God for our sake is willing to stoop down and, by such a wonderfully gentle and intimate invitation, entice us to him, so that we may rest safely and quietly under his protection.

Hence that dread and amazement with which as Scripture uniformly relates, holy men were struck and overwhelmed whenever they beheld the presence of God.

I grant more: thieves and murderers and other evildoers are the instruments of divine providence, and the Lord himself uses these to carry out the judgments that he has determined with himself. Yet I deny that they can derive from this any excuse for their evil deeds. Why?

That there exists in the human minds and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity, we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead, the memory of which he constantly renews and occasionally enlarges, that all to a man being aware that there is a God, and that he is their Maker, may be condemned by their own conscience when they neither worship him nor consecrate their lives to his service.

The fear he speaks of is that which renders us more cautious, not that which produces despondency, the fear which is felt when the mind confounded in itself resumes its equanimity in God, downcast in itself, takes courage in God, distrusting itself, breathes confidence in God.

Therefore, we are today far from wrong in applying this prophecy to the papists, who urge celibacy and abstinence from foods more forcefully than any precept of God.

For although the papists say something in passing about faith in Christ and the grace of the Holy Spirit, it is clear that they are much nearer to the heathen philosophers than to Christ and his apostles.

The church is compared to tents because it has no solid structure in the world.

We should ask God to increase our hope when it is small, awaken it when it is dormant, confirm it when it is wavering, strengthen it when it is weak, and raise it up when it is overthrown.

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

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

If it seems more horrible to kill a man in his own house, then in a field,...it ought surely to be deemed more atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb before it has come to light.