Top 23 Quotes & Sayings by Frances Ridley Havergal

We give thanks often with a tearful, doubtful voice, for our spiritual mercies positive, but what an almost infinite field there is for mercies negative! We cannot even imagine all that God has allowed us not to do, not to be.

We write our lives indeed, But in a cipher none can read, Except the author

CHRISTMAS DAY Jesus came! - and came for me. Simple words! and yet expressing Depths of holy mystery, Depths of wondrous love and blessing. Holy Spirit, make me see All His coming means for me; Take the things of Christ, I pray, Show them to my heart today.

No life can be dreary when work is delight.

Earthly joy can take but a bat-like flight, always checked, always limited, in dusk and darkness. But the love of Christ breaks through the vaulting, and leads us up into the free sky above, expanding to the very throne of Jehovah, and drawing us still upward to the infinite heights of glory.

A great deal of living must go to a very little writing.

Love understands love; it needs no talk.

Poetry is a second translation of the soul's feeling; it must be rendered into thought, and thought must change its nebulous robe of semi-wording into definite language, before it reaches another heart. Music is a first translation of feeling, needing no second, but entering the heart direct.

In perplexities-when we cannot tell what to do, when we cannot understand what is going on around us, let us be calmed and steadied and made patient by the thought that what is hidden from us is not hidden from Him

Might we never be the helpers of the great hinderer, Satan! Let us ask that the Lord Jesus would so perfectly tune our spirits to the keynote of His exceeding great love, that all our unconscious influence may breathe only of that love, and help all with whom we come in contact to obey the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.

They would make the 'Church ' their great meeting-point, rather than the Atonement of Christ. As far as my experience goes, they have more devoutness and less devotion, more fear and less love, more feeling of duty than of desire, laying more stress on Phil. ii. 12 than ver. 13, and in practice working upon the intellect and imagination rather than aiming at the heart, skirmishing among the outworks rather than assaulting the citadel.

Take my will, and make it Thine, It shall be no longer mine; Take my heart, it is Thine own; It shall be Thy royal throne.

Faithfulness to principle is only proved by faithfulness in detail.

Doubt indulged soon becomes doubt realized.

Every year, I might almost say every day, that I live, I seem to see more clearly how all the rest and gladness and power of our Christian life hinges on one thing; and that is, taking God at His word, believing that He really means exactly what He says, and accepting the very words in which He reveals His goodness and grace, without substituting others or altering the precise modes and tenses which He has seen fit to use.

Teach us, Master, how to give All we have and are to Thee; Grant us, Saviour, while we live, Wholly, only Thine to be.

Seldom can the heart be lonely, If it seek a lonelier still; Self-forgetting, seeking only Emptier cups of love to fill.

Oh to be my verse an answering gleam from higher radiance caught

I take this pain, Lord Jesus, From Thine own hand; The strength to bear it bravely Thou wilt command. I am too weak for effort. So let me rest, In hush of sweet submission On Thine own breast.

Silence is no certain token that no secret grief is there; Sorrow which is never spoken is the heaviest load to bear.

Hidden in the hollow Of His blessed hand, Never foe can follow, Never traitor stand; Not a surge of worry, Not a shade of care, Not a blast of hurry Touch the Spirit there.

Writing is praying with me. You know a child would look up at every sentence and say, 'And what shall I say next?' That is just what I do; I ask Him that at every line He would give me not merely thoughts and power, but also every word, even the very rhymes.

I do - oh, indeed I do - desire to live up to my profession, to be His, for time and eternity. But I am learning to sec how very weak I am, and how easily Satan can conquer me even when I do strive against him. I do believe with my head that Jesus can, and will give me His grace, and I do not need to fear, yet somehow my heart seems to be hard and cold and not to take it in. Oh, if we were but there - where there is no more sin ! Oh do not forget to pray for me, and don't ever doubt the love of your unworthy friend.