Top 181 Quotes & Sayings by Francois Fenelon - Page 3

To pray is to desire; but it is to desire what God would have us desire.

Thou lovest like an infinite God when Thou lovest; Thou movest heaven and earth to save Thy loved ones. Thou becomest man, a babe, the vilest of men, covered with reproaches, dying with infamy and under the pangs of the cross; all this is not too much for an infinite love.

There is no real elevation of mind in a contempt of little things; it is, on the contrary, from too narrow views that we consider those things of little importance which have in fact such extensive consequences.

How desirable is this simplicity! Who will give it to me? I will quit all else; it is the pearl of great price.

We must avoid fastidiousness; neatness, when it is moderate, is a virtue; but when it is carried to an extreme, it narrows the mind.

Those who are wholly God's are always happy.

God would behold in you a simplicity which will contain so much the more of His wisdom as it contains less of your own.

O Lord, I do most cheerfully commit all unto Thee.

The blood of a nation ought never to be shed except for its own preservation in the utmost extremity.

Even if no command to pray had existed, our very weakness would have suggested it.

We may as well tolerate all religions, since God Himself tolerates all.

Real friends are our greatest joy and our greatest sorrow. It were almost to be wished that all true and faithful friends should expire on the same day.

You really don't even own the present moment, for even this belongs to God.

Pity enlarges the heart.

How does our will become sanctified? By conforming itself unreservedly to that of God.

There are two principal points of attention necessary for the preservation of this constant spirit of prayer which unites us with God; we must continually seek to cherish it, and we must avoid everything that tends to make us lose it.

Wine is the source of the greatest evils among communities. It causes diseases, quarrels, seditions, idleness, aversion to labor, and family disorders. . . . It is a species of poison that causes madness. It does not make a man die, but it degrades him into a brute. Men may preserve their health and vigor without wine; with wine they run the risk of ruining their health and losing their morals.

If we love Him infinitely more than we do ourselves, we make an unconditional sacr Here it is that the Spirit teaches us all truth; for all truth is eminently contained in this sacrifice of love, where the soul strips itself of every thing to present it to God.

Sordid and infamous sensuality, the most dreadful evil that issued from the box of Pandora, corrupts every heart, and eradicates every virtue. Fly! wherefore dost thou linger? Fly, cast not one look behind thee; nor let even thy thought return to the accursed evil for a moment.

Avoid all refined speculations; confine yourself to simple reflections, and recur to them frequently. Those who pass too rapidly from one truth to another feed their curiosity and restlessness; they even distract their intellect with too great a multiplicity of views. Give every truth time to send down deep root into the heart.

Violent excitement exhausts the mind and leaves it withered and sterile.

Accustom yourself gradually to carry Prayer into all your daily occupation - speak, act, work in peace, as if you were in prayer, as indeed you ought to be.

There are some people who think that they should be always mourning, that they should put a continual constraint upon themselves, and feel a disgust for those amusements to which they are obliged to submit. For my own part, I confess that I know not how to conform myself to these rigid notions. I prefer something more simple, which I also think would be more pleasing to God.

True piety hath in it nothing weak, nothing sad, nothing constrained. It enlarges the heart; it is simple, free, and attractive.

Despondency is not a state of humility; on the contrary, it is the vexation and despair of a cowardly pride--nothing is worse; whether we stumble or whether we fall, we must only think of rising again and going on in our course.

God has not chosen to save us without crosses; as He has not seen fit to create men at once in the full vigor of manhood, but has suffered them to grow up by degrees amid all the perils and weaknesses of youth.

There were some who said that a man at the point of death was more free than all others, because death breaks every bond, and over the dead the united world has no power.

No human power can force the intrenchments of the human mind: compulsion never persuades; it only makes hypocrites.

It is often our own imperfection which makes us reprove the imperfection of others; a sharp-sighted self-love of others

When kings interfere in matters of religion, they enslave instead of protecting it.

God, who is liberal in all his other gifts, shows us, by the wise economy of His providence, how circumspect we ought to be in the management of our time, for He never gives us two moments together.

Do we accustom ourselves to see all things in the light of faith? Do we correct all our judgments by it? Alas! The greater part of Christians think and act like mere heathens; if we judge (as we justly may) of their faith by their practice, we must conclude they have no faith at all.

Let us endeavor to commence every enterprise with a pure view to the glory of God, continue it without distraction, and finish it without impatience.

On this earth all is temptation. Crosses tempt us by irritating our pride, and prosperity by flattering it. Our life is a continual combat, but one in which Jesus Christ fights for us. We must pass on unmoved, while temptations rage around us, as the traveler, overtaken by a storm, simply wraps his cloak more closely about him, and pushes on more vigorously toward his destined home.

It is only by fidelity in little things that the grace of true love to God can be sustained, and distinguished from a passing fervor of spirit. . . . No one can well believe that our piety is sincere, when our behavior is lax and irregular in its little details. What probability is there that we should not hesitate to make the greatest sacrifices, when we shrink from the smallest?

I would have no desire other than to accomplish thy will. Teach me to pray; pray thyself in me.

Before putting yourself in peril, it is necessary to foresee and fear it; but when one is there, nothing remains but to despise it.

The past but lives in written words: a thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept the pale unbodied shades to warn us from fleshless lips.

God felt, God tasted and enjoyed is indeed God, but God with those gifts which flatter the soul, God in darkness, in privation, in forsakenness, in sensibility, is so much God, that he is so to speak God bare and alone. Shall we fear this death, which is to produce in us the true divine life of grace?

As a general rule, those truths which we highly relish, and which shed a degree of practical light upon the things which we are required to give up for God, are leadings of Divine grace, which we should follow without hesitation.

Simplicity brings back the joys of Paradise. Not that we have pure pleasure without a moment's suffering, but when we are surrendered to God, we are not grasping for pleasure, and even our troubles are received with thanksgiving. This inner harmony, and this deliverance from fear and the tormenting desires of self, create a satisfaction in the soul which is above all the intoxicating joys of this world put together.

I had often heard Mentor say, that the voluptuous were never brave, and I now found by experience that it was true; for the Cyprians whose jollity had been so extravagant and tumultuous, now sunk under a sense of their danger and wept like women. I heard nothing but the screams of terror and the wailings of hopeless distress. Some lamented the loss of pleasures that were never to return; but none had presence of mind either to undertake or direct the navigation of the menaced vessel.

The passion of acquiring riches in order to support a vain expense corrupts the purest souls.

It is this unquiet self-love that renders us so sensitive. The sick man, who sleeps ill, thinks the night long. We exaggerate, from cowardice, all the evils which we encounter; they are great, but our sensibility increases them. The true way to bear them is to yield ourselves up with confidence to God.

If we were faultless, we should not be so much annoyed by the defects of those with whom we associate. If we were to acknowledge honestly that we have not virtue enough to bear patiently with our neighbor's weaknesses, we should show our own imperfection, and this alarms our vanity.

Nothing is more false and more indiscreet than always to want to choose what mortifies us in everything. By this rule a person would soon ruin his health, his business, his reputation, his relations with his relatives and friends, in fact every good work which Providence gives him.

Were in prayer, as indeed you ought to be.

How dangerous it is for our salvation, how unworthy of God and of ourselves, how pernicious even for the peace of our hearts, to want always to stay where we are! Our whole life was only given us to advance us by great strides toward our heavenly country.

Mankind, by the perverse depravity of their nature, esteem that which they have most desired as of no value the moment it is possessed, and torment themselves with fruitless wishes for that which is beyond their reach.

I am not in the least surprised that your impression of death becomes more lively, in proportion as age and infirmity bring it nearer. God makes use of this rough trial to undeceive us in respect to our courage, to make us feel our weakness, and to keep us in all humility in His hands.

Our piety must be weak and imperfect if it do not conquer our fear of death.

Let us often think of our own infirmities, and we shall become indulgent toward those of others.

The greatest defect of common education is, that we are in the habit of putting pleasure all on one side, and weariness on the other; all weariness in study, all pleasure in idleness.

To be faithful in prayer it is indispensable that we arrange all the activities of the day with a regularity that nothing can disturb

A cross borne in simplicity, without the interference of self-love to augment it, is only half a cross. Suffering in this simplicity of love, we are not only happy in spile of the cross, but because of it; for love is pleased in suffering for the Well Beloved, and the cross which forms us into His image is a consoling bond of love.

All wars are civil ones; for it is still man spilling his own blood, tearing out his own bowels.

I believe that we are conforming to the divine order and the will of Providence when we are doing even indifferent things that belong to our condition.

The kingdom of God which is within us consists in our willing whatever God wills, always, in every thing, and without reservation; and thus His kingdom comes; for His will is then done as it is in heaven, since we will nothing but what is dictated by His sovereign pleasure.

This is the love that does all things; that brings to pass even the evils we suffer; so shaping them that they are but instruments of preparing the good which, as yet, has not arrived.

Crosses are of no use to us but inasmuch as we yield ourselves up to them and forget ourselves.