Elizabeth Prentiss Quotes

The longer I live the more conscious I am of human frailty, and of the constant, overwhelming need we all have of God’s grace.

Here is a little mouth to kiss; here are two more feet to make music with their pattering about my nursery. Here is a soul to train for God, and the body in which it dwells is worth all it will cost, since it is abode of a kingly tenant. I may see less of friends, but I have gained one dearer than them all. Yes, my precious baby, you are welcome to your mothers heart, welcome to her time, her strength, her health, to her most tender cares, to her life-long prayers! Oh how rich I am, how truly, how wondrously blest!

The thorny path bears some of the sweetest flowers that adorn life. And when with naked, bleeding feet we walk upon a flinty soil, we often find diamonds.

Some of His children must go into the furnace to testify that the Son of God is there with them.

Not till I was shut up to prayer and to the study of God's word by the loss of earthly joys sickness destroying the flavor of them all did I begin to penetrate the mystery that is learned under the cross. And wondrous as it is, how simple is this mystery! To love Christ, and to know that I love Him this is all.

Much of my experience of life has cost me a great price and I wish to use it for strengthening and comforting other souls.

Bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. Take what I cannot give: my heart, body, thoughts, time, abilities, money, health, strength, nights, days, youth, age, and spend them in Thy service, 0 my crucified Master, Redeemer, God. Oh, let not these be mere words! Whom have I in heaven but Thee and there is none upon earth that I desire in comparison of Thee. My heart is athirst for God.

If the loss of your fortune gains Christ for you, it will be a beautiful loss.

We must be wise taskmasters and not require of ourselves what we cannot possibly perform. Recreation we must have. Otherwise, the strings of our soul, wound up to an unnatural tension, will break.

To love Christ more, is the deepest need, the constant cry of my soul Out in the woods and on my bed and out driving, when I am happy and busy, and when I am sad and idle, the whisper keeps going up for more love, more love, more love!

Ah, what a life is theirs who live in Christ; How vast the mystery! Reaching in height to heaven, and in its depth The unfathomed sea!

I am not sure that it is best for us, once safe and secure on the Rock of Ages, to ask ourselves too closely what this and that experience may signify. Is it not better to be thinking of the Rock, not of the feet that stand upon it?

No truth can be said to be seen as it is until it is seen in its relation to all other truths. In this relation only is it true.

Go home and say to yourself, ‘I am a wayward, foolish child. But He loves me! I have disobeyed and grieved Him ten thousand times. But He loves me! I have lost faith in some of my dearest friends and am very desolate. But He loves me! I do not love Him, I am even angry with Him! But He loves me!

The best convent for a woman is the seclusion of her own home. There she may find her vocation and fight her battles, and there she may learn the reality and the earnestness of life.

Sleep, baby, sleep. Thy father's watching the sheep. Thy mother's shaking the dreamland tree, and down drops a little dream for thee.

It sweetens every bit of work to think that I am doing it in humble, far-off, yet real imitation of Jesus.

If you could once make up your mind never to undertake more work ... than you can carry on calmly, quietly, without hurry or flurry ... and if the instant you feel yourself growing nervous and ... out of breath, you would stop and take a breath, you would find this simple common-sense rule doing for you what no prayers or tears could ever accomplish.

The question is not whether you ever gave yourself to God, but whether you are His now.

O happy life! life hid with Christ in God! So making me At home and by the wayside and abroad, Alone with Thee.