Top 17 Quotes & Sayings by Jean Baptiste Massillon

Agreeable advice is seldom useful advice.

Every effort is made in forming matrimonial alliances to reconcile matters relating to fortune, but very little is paid to the congeniality of dispositions, or to the accordance of hearts.

Whatever passes away is too vile to be the price of time, which is itself the price of eternity.

To be proud and inaccessible is to be timid and weak.

Time is short, your obligations are infinite. Are your houses regulated, your children instructed, the afflicted relieved, the poor visited, the work of piety accomplished?

I would have none of that rigid circumspect charity which is never done without scrutiny, and which always mistrusts the truth of the necessities laid open to it.

I love a serious preacher, who speaks for my sake and not for his own; who seeks my salvation, and not his own vain glory. He best deserves to be heard who uses speech only to clothe his thoughts, and his thoughts only to promote truth and virtue.

Our acts of kindness we reserve for our friends, our bounties for our dependants, our riches for our children and relations, our praises for those who appear worthy of them, our time we give all to the world; we expose it, I may say, a prey to all mankind.

True charity is liable to excesses and transports.

Yes, great God, these torrents of tears which flow down from my eyes announce thy divine presence in my soul. This heart hitherto so dry, so arid, so hard; this rock which thou hast struck a second time, will not resist thee any longer, for out of it there now gushes healthful waters in abundance. The selfsame voice of God which overturns the mountains, thunders, lightens, and divides the heaven above, now commands the clouds to pour forth showers of blessings, changing the desert of his soul into a field producing a hundredfold; that voice I hear.

Every Christian is born great because he is born for heaven.

There are some sins which are more justly to be denominated surprises than infidelities. To such the world should be lenient, as, doubtless, Heaven is forgiving.

God should be the object of all our desires, the end of all our actions, the principle of all our affections, and the governing power of our whole souls.

Slander is perhaps the only vice which no circumstance can palliate, as well as being one which we are most ingenious in concealing from ourselves.

We die every day; every moment deprives us of a portion of life and advances us a step toward the grave; our whole life is only along and painful sickness.

Nothing is more detestable than a professed declaimer who retails his discourses as a quack does his medicines.

Charity is that sweet-smelling savor of Jesus Christ, which vanishes and is extinguished from the moment that it is exposed.