Quotes by William Law

• Hell is nothing else but nature departed or excluded from the beam of divine light.
• Nothing hath separated us from God but our own will, or rather our own will is our separation from God.
• What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?
• We must alter our lives in order to alter our hearts, for it is impossible to live one way and pray another.
• What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?
• This, and this alone, is Christianity, a universal holiness in every part of life, a heavenly wisdom in all our actions, not conforming to the spirit and temper of the world but turning all worldly enjoyments into means of piety and devotion to God.
• Self is the root, the tree, and the branches of all the evils of our fallen state.
• Perfection does not consist in any singular state or condition of life, or in any particular set of duties, but in holy and religious conduct of ourselves in every state of Life.
• Be intent upon the perfection of the present day.
• No education can be of true advantage to young women but that which trains them up in humble industry, in great plainness of living, in exact modesty of dress.
• Death is not more certainly a separation of our souls from our bodies than the Christian life is a separation of our souls from worldly tempers, vain indulgences, and unnecessary cares.
• Faith is not a notion, but a real strong essential hunger, an attracting or magnetic desire of Christ, which as it proceeds from a seed of the divine nature in us, so it attracts and unites with its like.
• God seeth different abilities and frailties of men, which may move His goodness to be merciful to their different improvements in virtue.
• He who has learned to pray has learned the greatest secret of a holy and happy life.
• Ask what Time is, it is nothing else but something of eternal duration become finite, measurable and transitory.
• Humility is nothing else but a right judgment of ourselves.
• Be intent on the perfection of the present day.
• If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead.
• All people desire what they believe will make them happy. If a person is not full of desire for God, we can only conclude that he is engaged with another happiness.
• Love has no errors, for all errors are the want for love.
• Love and pity and wish well to every soul in the world; dwell in love, and then you dwell in God.