Top 80 Frederick William Robertson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “God’s justice and love are one. Infinite justice must be infinite love. Justice is but another sign of love.”

— Frederick William Robertson

2. “There is a past which is gone forever, but there is a future which is still our own.”

— Frederick William Robertson

3. “There are three things in the world that deserve no mercy, hypocrisy, fraud, and tyranny.”

— Frederick William Robertson

4. “Instruction ends in the schoolroom, but education ends only with life. A child is given to the universe to be educated.”

— Frederick William Robertson

5. “It is not the situation that makes the man, but the man who makes the situation.”

— Frederick William Robertson

6. “You reap what you sow – not something else, but that. An act of love makes the soul more loving. A deed of humbleness deepens humbleness. The thing reaped is the very thing sown, multiplied a hundred fold. You have sown a seed of life, you reap life everlasting.”

— Frederick William Robertson

7. “To believe is to be strong. Doubt cramps energy. Belief is power.”

— Frederick William Robertson

8. “Christ within us, the hope of glory.”

— Frederick William Robertson

9. “Christ’s miracles were vivid manifestations to the senses that He is the Saviour of the body – and now as then the issues of life and death are in His hands – that our daily existence is a perpetual miracle. The extraordinary was simply a manifestation of God’s power in the ordinary.”

— Frederick William Robertson

10. “I will tell you what to hate. Hate hypocrisy, hate cant, hate indolence, oppression, injustice; hate Pharisaism; hate them as Christ hated them with a deep, living, godlike hatred.”

— Frederick William Robertson

11. “There is a divine depth in silence. We meet God alone.”

— Frederick William Robertson

12. “A heart renewed – a loving heart – a penitent and humble heart – a heart broken and contrite, purified by love – that and only that is the rest of men. Spotlessness may do for angels, repentance unto life is the highest that belongs to man.”

— Frederick William Robertson

13. “Poetry creates life; Science dissects death.”

— Frederick William Robertson

14. “In these two things the greatness of man consists, to have God dwelling in us as to impart His character to us, and to have Him dwelling in us, that we recognize His presence, and know that we are His, and He is ours. The one is salvation; the other, the assurance of it.”

— Frederick William Robertson

15. “Mourning after an absent God is an evidence of a love as strong, as rejoicing in a present one.”

— Frederick William Robertson

16. “He who, with strong passions, remains chaste – he who, keenly sensitive, with manly power of indignation in him, can yet restrain himself and forgive – these are strong men, spiritual heroes.”

— Frederick William Robertson

17. “We win by tenderness. We conquer by forgiveness.”

— Frederick William Robertson

18. “As the tree is fertilized by its own broken branches and fallen leaves, and grows out of its own decay, so men and nations are bettered and improved by trial, and refined out of broken hopes and blighted expectations.”

— Frederick William Robertson

19. “Women and God are the two rocks on which a man must either anchor or be wrecked.”

— Frederick William Robertson

20. “Defeat in doing right is nevertheless victory.”

— Frederick William Robertson

21. “We are too much haunted by ourselves, projecting the central shadow of self on everything around us. And then comes the Gospel to rescue us from this selfishness. Redemption is this, to forget self in God.”

— Frederick William Robertson

22. “The charm of the words of great men, those grand sayings which are recognized as true as soon as heard, is this, that you recognize them as wisdom which has passed across your own mind. You feel that they are your own thoughts come back to you...”

— Frederick William Robertson

23. “In all matters of eternal truth, the soul is before the intellect; the things of God are spiritually discerned. You know truth by being true; you recognize God by being like Him.”

— Frederick William Robertson

24. “Simpler manners, purer lives; more self-denial; more earnest sympathy with the classes that lie below us, nothing short of that can lay the foundations of the Christianity which is to be hereafter, deep and broad.”

— Frederick William Robertson

25. “The mistake we make is to look for a source of comfort in ourselves: self-contemplation, instead of gazing upon God. In other words, we look for comfort precisely where comfort never can be.”

— Frederick William Robertson

26. “The Christian life is not knowing or hearing, but doing.”

— Frederick William Robertson

27. “No man ever progressed to greatness and goodness but through great mistakes.”

— Frederick William Robertson

28. “However dark and profitless, however painful and weary, existence may have become, life is not done, and our Christian character is not won, so long as God has anything left for us to suffer, or anything left for us to do.”

— Frederick William Robertson

29. “No one can be great, or good, or happy except through the inward efforts of themselves.”

— Frederick William Robertson

30. “Only in the sacredness of inward silence does the soul truly meet the secret, hiding God. The strength of resolve, which afterward shapes life, and mixes itself with action, is the fruit of those sacred, solitary moments. There is a divine depth in silence. We meet God alone.”

— Frederick William Robertson

31. “That prayer which does not succeed in moderating our wishes – in changing the passionate desire into still submission, the anxious, tumultuous expectation into silent surrender – is no true prayer, and proves that we have not the spirit of true prayer.”

— Frederick William Robertson

32. “A silent man is easily reputed wise. A man who suffers none to see him in the common jostle and undress of life, easily gathers round him a mysterious veil of unknown sanctity, and men honor him for a saint. The unknown is always wonderful.”

— Frederick William Robertson

33. “Pray till prayer makes you forget your own wish, and leave it or merge it in God’s will.”

— Frederick William Robertson

34. “A happy home is the single spot of rest which a man has upon this earth for the cultivation of his noblest sensibilities.”

— Frederick William Robertson

35. “It is not the number of books you read, nor the variety of sermons you hear, but it is the frequency and earnestness with which you meditate on these things till the truth in them becomes your own and part of your being, that insures your growth.”

— Frederick William Robertson

36. “If you think that you can sin, and then by cries avert the consequences of sin, you insult God’s character.”

— Frederick William Robertson

37. “It is not by change of circumstances, but by fitting our spirits to the circumstances in which God has placed us, that we can be reconciled to life and duty.”

— Frederick William Robertson

38. “On earth we have nothing to do with success or results, but only with being true to God, and for God. Defeat in doing right is nevertheless victory.”

— Frederick William Robertson

39. “To turn water into wine, and what is common into what is holy, is indeed the glory of Christianity.”

— Frederick William Robertson

40. “This is the true liberty of Christ, when a free man binds himself in love to duty. Not in shrinking from our distasteful occupations, but in fulfilling them, do we realize our high origin.”

— Frederick William Robertson

41. “Sow the seeds of life – humbleness, pure-heartedness, love; and in the long eternity which lies before the soul, every minutest grain will come up again with an increase of thirty, sixty, or a hundred fold.”

— Frederick William Robertson

42. “Two thousand years ago there was One here on this earth who lived the grandest life that ever has been lived yet – a life that every thinking man, with deeper or shallower meaning, has agreed to call divine.”

— Frederick William Robertson

43. “Child of God, if you would have your thought of God something beyond a cold feeling of His presence, let faith appropriate Christ.”

— Frederick William Robertson

44. “I read hard, or not at all; never skimming, never turning aside to merely inciting books; and Plato, Aristotle, Butler, Thucydides, Sterne, Jonathan Edwards, have passed like the iron atoms of the blood into my mental constitution.”

— Frederick William Robertson

45. “To believe is to be happy; to doubt is to be wretched. To believe is to be strong. Doubt cramps energy. Belief is power. Only so far as a man believes strongly, mightily, can he act cheerfully, or do any thing that is worth the doing.”

— Frederick William Robertson

46. “The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.”

— Frederick William Robertson

47. “Through ages, through eternity, what you have done for Christ, that, and only that, you are.”

— Frederick William Robertson

48. “What the world calls virtue is a name and a dream without Christ. The foundation of all human excellence must be laid deep in the blood of the Redeemer’s cross, and in the power of His resurrection.”

— Frederick William Robertson

49. “Tell men that God is love; that right is right, and wrong, wrong; let them cease to admire philanthropy, and begin to love men; cease to pant for heaven, and begin to love God; then the spirit of liberty begins.”

— Frederick William Robertson

50. “The Divine wisdom has given us prayer, not as a means whereby to obtain the good things of earth, but as a means whereby we learn to do without them; not as a means whereby we escape evil, but as a means whereby we become strong to meet it.”

— Frederick William Robertson