Prayer is the nearest approach to God and the highest enjoyment of Him that we are capable of in this life.
– William Law
Prayer
There is nothing that makes us love a man so much as praying for him.
– William Law
Prayer | Love
Divine love is perfect peace and joy, it is a freedom from all disquiet, it is all content and happiness; and makes everything to rejoice in itself.
– William Law
Happiness | Freedom | Love
We must devote, not only times and places to prayer, but be everywhere in the spirit of devotion; with hearts always set toward heaven, looking up to God in all our actions, and doing everything as His servants; living in the world as in a holy temple of God, and always worshiping Him, though not with our lips, yet with the thankfulness of our hearts, the holiness of our actions and the pious and charitable use of all His gifts.
– William Law
Thankfulness | Worship | Gifts
You can have no greater sign of confirmed pride than when you think you are humble enough.
– William Law
Pride | Humility
The greatest saint in the world is not he who prays most or fasts most; it is not he who gives alms, or is most eminent for temperance, chastity or justice. It is he who is most thankful to God.
– William Law
Gratitude | Fasting
From morning to night keep Jesus in thy heart, long for nothing, desire nothing, hope for nothing but to have all that is within thee changed into the spirit and temper of the holy Jesus.
– William Law
Jesus | Perseverance | Change
Nothing harms or destroys us but the wrong use of that liberty of choice which God has entrusted to us.
– William Law
Selfishness | Choices | Liberty
If our life is not a course of humility, self-denial, renunciation of the world, poverty of spirit, and heavenly affection, we do not live the lives of Christians.
– William Law
Christians | Humility | Self-denial
Self is the root, the tree, and the branches of all the evils of our fallen state.
– William Law
Selfishness
Reading is good, hearing is good, conversation and meditation are good; but then, they are only good at times and occasions, in a certain degree, and must be used and governed with such caution as we eat and drink and refresh ourselves, or they will bring forth in us the fruits of intemperance.
– William Law
Discretion | Meditation
To be always in a thankful state of heart before God is not to be considered a high plane of spirituality but rather the normal attitude of one who believes that “all things work together for good to them that love God, who are called according to his purpose.”
– William Law
Gratitude | Attitude
Receive every day as a resurrection from death, as a new enjoyment of life; meet every rising sun with such sentiments of God’s goodness, as if you had seen it, and all things, new-created upon your account: and under the sense of so great a blessing, let your joyful heart praise and magnify so good and glorious a Creator.
– William Law
Praise | Life
He who has learned to pray has learned the greatest secret of a holy and happy life.
– William Law
Prayer | Holiness
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.
– William Law
Modesty | Youth | Women
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.
– William Law
Happiness
God seeth different abilities and frailties of men, which may move His goodness to be merciful to their different improvements in virtue.
– William Law
Mercy | Virtue
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.
– William Law
Death | Worldliness
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.
– William Law
Faith | Unity
What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?
– William Law
Selfishness
This new birth in Christ, thus firmly believed and continually desired, will do everything that thou wantest to have done in thee, it will dry up all the springs of vice, stop all the workings of evil in thy nature, it will bring all that is good into thee, it will open all the gospel within thee, and thou wilt know what it is to be taught of God.
– William Law
Conversion | The Holy Spirit
We are looking for our own virtue, our own piety, our own goodness, and so live on and in our own poverty and weakness – today pleased and comforted with the seeming firmness and strength of our own pious tempers and fancying ourselves to be somewhat. Tomorrow, fallen into our own mire, we are dejected, but not humbled; we grieve, but it is only the grief of pride at the seeing our perfection not to be such as we had vainly imagined. And thus it will be, till the whole turn of our minds be so changed that we as fully see and know our inability to have any goodness of our own as to have a life of our own.
– William Law
Pride | Grief | Virtue
The spirit of prayer is a pressing forth of the soul out of this earthly life, it is a stretching with all its desire after the life of God, it is a leaving, as far as it can, all its own spirit, to receive a spirit from above, to be one life, one love, one spirit with Christ in God.
– William Law
Prayer | The Holy Spirit
Be intent on the perfection of the present day.
– William Law
Achievement
Christ is the breathing forth of the heart, life and spirit of God into all the dead race of Adam. He is the seeker, the finder, the restorer of all that, from Cain to the end of time, was lost and dead to the life of God. He is the love that prays for all its murderers; the love that willingly suffers and dies among thieves, that thieves may have a life with him in Paradise; the love that visits publicans, harlots and sinners, and wants and seeks to forgive where most is to be forgiven.
– William Law
Christ | Restoration | Murder
Love and pity and wish well to every soul in the world; dwell in love, and then you dwell in God.
– William Law
Love | Encouragement
As all types and figures in the Law were but empty shadows without the coming of Christ, so the New Testament is but a dead letter without the Holy Spirit in redeemed men as the living power of a full salvation.
– William Law
Scripture | The Holy Spirit | Redemption
Whenever a man allows himself to have anxieties, fears, or complaints, he must consider his behavior as either a denial of the wisdom of God or as a confession that he is out of his will.
– William Law
Anxiety
Follow Christ in the denial of all the wills of self, and then all is put away that separates you from God; the heaven born new creature will come to life in you, which alone knows and enjoys the things of God, and has his daily food of gladness in that manifold blessed, and blessed, which Christ preached on the mount.
– William Law
Obedience
He that rightly understands the reasonableness and Excellency of charity will know that it can never be excusable to waste any of our money in pride and folly.
– William Law
Charity | Money
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.
– William Law
Christianity | Piety
Wherever thou goest, whatever thou dost at home, or abroad, in the field, or at church, do all in a desire of union with Christ, in imitation of His tempers and inclinations, and look upon all as nothing, but that which exercises, and increases the spirit and life of Christ in thy soul.
– William Law
Service
The spirit of prayer is for all times and occasions; it is a lamp that is to be always burning, a light to be ever shining: everything calls for it; everything is to be done in it and governed by it, because it is and means and wills nothing else but the totality of the soul – not doing this or that, but wholly given up to God to be where and what and how He pleases.
– William Law
Prayer | Obedience | Light
Whatever littleness and vanity is to be observed in the minds of women, it is, like the cruelty of butchers, a temper that is wrought into them by that life which they are taught and accustomed to lead.
– William Law
Character
If you here stop and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as the early Christians were, your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance nor through inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.
– William Law
Piety
If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead.
– William Law
Eternity
He who complains of the weather, complains of the God who ordained the weather!
– William Law
God
Hell is nothing else but nature departed or excluded from the beam of divine light.
– William Law
Hell
Nothing hath separated us from God but our own will, or rather our own will is our separation from God.
– William Law
Rebellion
Ask what Time is, it is nothing else but something of eternal duration become finite, measurable and transitory.
– William Law
Eternity | Time
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.
– William Law
Holiness
When you begin to pray, use such expressions of the attributes of God as will make you sensible of His greatness and power.
– William Law
Prayer
You are to think of yourself as only existing in this world to do God’s will. To think that you are your own is as absurd as to think you are self-created. It is an obvious first principle that you belong completely to God.
– William Law
Service
What an immense workman is God! In miniature as well as in the great. With the one hand, perhaps, He is making a ring of one hundred thousand miles in diameter, to revolve round a planet like Saturn, and with the other is forming a tooth in the ray of the feather of a humming-bird, or a point in the claw of the foot of a microscopic insect. When He works in miniature, everything is gilded, polished, and perfect, but whatever is made by human art, as a needle, etc., when viewed by a microscope, appears rough, and coarse, and bungling.
– William Law
God
Read whatever chapter of scripture you will, and be ever so delighted with it – yet it will leave you as poor, as empty and unchanged as it found you unless it has turned you wholly and solely to the Spirit of God, and brought you into full union with and dependence upon him.
– William Law
Scripture | The Holy Spirit
If someone is leaving you behind, and you are becoming jealous and embittered, keep praying that he may have success in the very matter where he is awakening your envy; and whether he is helped or not, one thing is sure, that your own soul will be cleansed and ennobled.
– William Law
Jealousy | Bitterness
When therefore the first spark of a desire after God arises in thy soul, cherish it with all thy care, give all thy heart into it; it is nothing less than a touch of the divine loadstone, that is to draw thee out of the vanity of time, into the riches of eternity.
– William Law
God | Obedience
You have no questions to ask of any body, no new way that you need inquire after; no oracle that you need to consult; for whilst you shut yourself up in patience, meekness, humility, and resignation to God, you are in the very arms of Christ, your heart is His dwelling-place, and He lives and works in you.
– William Law
Obedience | Meekness
Feasts and business and pleasure and enjoyments seem great things to us, whilst we think of nothing else; but as soon as we add death to them they all sink into an equal littleness.
– William Law
Death | Business
The sun meets not the springing bud that stretches towards him with half the certainty that God, the source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him.
– William Law
Faith
The eyes of our souls only then begin to see when our bodily eyes are closing.
– William Law
Faith
Humility is nothing else but a right judgment of ourselves.
– William Law
Humility
What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?
– William Law
Reasoning
Love has no errors, for all errors are the want for love.
– William Law
Love
We must alter our lives in order to alter our hearts, for it is impossible to live one way and pray another.
– William Law
Life | Prayer | The Heart
For the love which God bears to the soul, His eternal, never-ceasing desire to enter into it, and to dwell in it, stays no longer than till the door of the heart opens for Him. For nothing does, or can keep God out of the soul, or hinder His holy union with it, but the desire of the heart turned from Him.
– William Law
Worship