Quotes from Frederick William Faber

Love's secret is always to be doing things for God, and not to mind because they are such very little ones.

They always win who side with God.

Faith of our fathers! holy faith!We will be true to thee till death.

There are souls in this world who have the gift of finding joy everywhere, and leaving it behind them when they go.

Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still.

A spiritual life, without a very large allowance of disquietude in it, is no spiritual life at all. It is but a flattering superstition of self-love.

I reckon failure to be the most universal unhappiness on earth. Almost everybody and everything are failures—failures in their own estimation, even if they are not so in the estimation of others. Those optimists who always think themselves successful are few in number, and they for the most part fail in this at least, namely, that they cannot persuade the rest of the world of their success.

It has been curiously remarked by St. Andrew Avellino that those who have a special devotion to the Passion generally die quiet and sweet deaths, as the Virgin Mary, St. John the Evangelist, and St. Mary Magdalen did. Certainly it is remarkable that, while most of those close to Our Lord died violent deaths, the three who assisted at Calvary should have died so softly, as if already their real death had been died there.

Even a well-founded suspicion more or less degrades a man. His suspicion may be verified, and he may escape some material harm by having cherished the suspicion. But he is unavoidably the worse man in consequence of having entertained it.

He that is a slave to Lilliputian comforts will find a giant behind the curtains of his deathbed, who is not unlikely to strangle him in the weakness of that hour of retribution.

Sorrow is a sanctuary as long as self is kept outside. [...] let us not foster, embrace, rekindle and indulge our grief. For then our sorrow is a selfish and luxurious fiction, a ground in which the Holy Spirit will not dig.

Rightly considered, kindness is the grand cause of God in the world. Where it is natural, it must forthwith be super-naturalized. Where it is not natural, it must be supernaturally planted. What is the purpose our life? It is a mission to go into every corner it can reach, and reconquer for God's beatitude His unhappy world back to Him.

The world is growing old;Who would not be at rest and freeWhere love is never cold?

Kindness has converted more sinners than zeal, eloquence, or learning.

He (God) never comes to those who do not wait.

We must have passed through life unobservantly, if we have never perceived that a man is very much himself what he thinks of others.

Every moment of resistance to temptation is a victory.