Top 300 J. C. Ryle Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “If anyone feels his sins, let him come at once, straight, direct, not merely to church, or to the sacrament, or to repentance, or to prayer, but to Christ Himself.”

— J. C. Ryle

252. “Who shall dare to talk of strength when David can fall?”

— J. C. Ryle

253. “If you do not love Christ, let me plainly tell you what is the reason: You have no sense of debt to Him.”

— J. C. Ryle

254. “If you would train your children rightly, train them in the way they should go and not in the way they would.”

— J. C. Ryle

255. “Let us daily strive to copy our Saviour’s humility.”

— J. C. Ryle

256. “The Christian who keeps their heart diligently in little things shall be kept from great falls.”

— J. C. Ryle

257. “If Christianity is a mere invention of man, and the Bible is not from God, how can infidels explain Jesus Christ? His existence in history they cannot deny. How is it that without force or bribery, without arms or money, He has made such an immensely deep mark on the world as He certainly has?”

— J. C. Ryle

258. “Persecution, in short, is like the goldsmith’s stamp on real silver and gold – it is one of the marks of a converted man.”

— J. C. Ryle

259. “Surely if there be any habit which your own hand and eye should help in forming, it is the habit of prayer.”

— J. C. Ryle

260. “Fear puts an end to openness of manner; fear leads to concealment; fear sows the seed of much hypocrisy, and leads to many a lie.”

— J. C. Ryle

261. “If we would know whether our faith is genuine, we do well to ask ourselves how we are living.”

— J. C. Ryle

262. “Am I honest? Am I sincere? Do I really desire first the praise of God?”

— J. C. Ryle

263. “So long as you do not quarrel with sin, you will never be a truly happy man.”

— J. C. Ryle

264. “No person ever thought too much of Christ.”

— J. C. Ryle

265. “The love of the Bible will show itself in a believer’s actions.”

— J. C. Ryle

266. “The minister who keeps back hell from his people in his sermons is neither a faithful nor a charitable man.”

— J. C. Ryle

267. “Sin rarely seems sin at first beginnings.”

— J. C. Ryle

268. “A right heart leans on Christ, hangs on Christ, builds on Christ and cleaves to Christ.”

— J. C. Ryle

269. “The Christianity that saves is a thing personally grasped, personally experienced, personally felt and personally possessed.”

— J. C. Ryle

270. “How is it that many who profess and call themselves Christians, do so little for the Savior whose name they bear?”

— J. C. Ryle

271. “Pride cast Adam out of paradise. He was not content with the place God assigned him. He tried to raise himself, and fell. Thus sin, sorrow and death entered into this world by pride.”

— J. C. Ryle

272. “It costs something to be a true Christian. It will cost us our sins, our self-righteousn ess, our ease and our worldliness.”

— J. C. Ryle

273. “Ignorance of Scripture is the root of every error in religion, and the source of every heresy.”

— J. C. Ryle

274. “We are evidently no friends of Satan. Like the kings of this world, he wars not against his own subjects. The very fact that he assaults us should fill our minds with hope.”

— J. C. Ryle

275. “Hell, hell fire, the damnation of hell, eternal damnation, the resurrection of the damnation, everlasting fire, the place of torment, destruction, outer darkness, the worm that never dies, the fire that is not quenched, the place of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, everlasting punishment... these are the words which the Lord Jesus Christ Himself employs. Away with the miserable nonsense which people talk in this day who tell us that the ministers of the gospel should never speak of hell.”

— J. C. Ryle

276. “We must be holy, because this is the only sound evidence that we have a saving faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.”

— J. C. Ryle

277. “Faith is to prayer what the feather is to the arrow: without it prayer will not hit the mark.”

— J. C. Ryle

278. “We live in an age when there is a false glare on the things of time and a great mist over the things of eternity.”

— J. C. Ryle

279. “We can never hear too much about Jesus Christ.”

— J. C. Ryle

280. “Let us only take heed that this office of Christ is not set before us in vain. It will profit us nothing at the last day that Jesus was a Shepherd, if during our lifetime, we never heard His voice and followed Him. If we love life, let us join His flock without delay.”

— J. C. Ryle

281. “The true secret of spiritual strength is self-distrust and deep humilty.”

— J. C. Ryle

282. “Experience supplies painful proof that traditions once called into being are first called useful, then they become necessary. At last they are too often made idols, and all must bow down to them or be punished.”

— J. C. Ryle

283. “If Christ had not gone to the cross and suffered in our stead, the just for the unjust, there would not have been a spark of hope for us. There would have been a mighty gulf between ourselves and God, which no man ever could have passed.”

— J. C. Ryle

284. “I must honestly declare my conviction that, since the days of the Reformation, there never has been so much profession of religion without practice, so much talking about God without walking with Him, so much hearing God’s words without doing them...”

— J. C. Ryle

285. “If I never spoke of hell, I should think I had kept back something that was profitable, and should look on myself as an accomplice of the devil.”

— J. C. Ryle

286. “What young men will be, in all probability depends on what they are now, and they seem to forget this. Youth is the planting time of full age, the molding season in the little space of human life, the turning point in the history of man’s mind.”

— J. C. Ryle

287. “Those who confine God’s love exclusively to the elect appear to me to take a narrow and contracted view of God’s character and attributes... I have long come to the conclusion that men may be more systematic in their statements than the Bible, and may be led into grave error by idolatrous veneration of a system.”

— J. C. Ryle

288. “In justification the word to be addressed to man is believe – only believe; in sanctification the word must be ‘watch, pray, and fight.’”

— J. C. Ryle

289. “There is a vast quantity of religion current in the world which is not true, genuine Christianity. It passes muster, it satisfies sleepy consciences; but it is not good money. It is not the authentic reality that called itself Christianity in the beginning.”

— J. C. Ryle

290. “Conduct is the grand test of character. Words are one great evidence of the condition of the heart.”

— J. C. Ryle

291. “We want more men and women who walk with God and before God, like Enoch and Abraham.”

— J. C. Ryle

292. “We may be very sure that men fall in private long before they fall in public. They are backsliders on their knees long before they backslide openly in the eyes of the world. Like Peter, they first disregard the Lord’s warning to watch and pray; and then, like Peter, their strength is gone, and in the hour of temptation they deny their Lord. The world takes notice of their fall, and scoffs loudly. But the world knows nothing of the real reason.”

— J. C. Ryle

293. “The banknote without a signature at the bottom is nothing but a worthless piece of paper. A few strokes of a pen confer on it all its value. The prayer of a poor child of Adam is a feeble thing in itself, but once endorsed by the hand of the Lord Jesus it accomplishes much.”

— J. C. Ryle

294. “Any well-read man knows that the moral difference between the condition of the world before Christianity was planted and since Christianity took root is the difference between night and day, the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of the devil.”

— J. C. Ryle

295. “Set your immortal soul before your mind’s eye, and when men ask you why you live as you do, answer them in his spirit, “I live for my soul.”

— J. C. Ryle

296. “Pride makes us rest content with ourselves – think we are good enough as we are – keep us from taking advice – refuse the gospel of Christ – turn every one to his own way. But pride never reigns anywhere so powerfully as in the heart of a young man.”

— J. C. Ryle

297. “Prayer and temptation, the Bible and meditation, make a true minister of the gospel.”

— J. C. Ryle

298. “Paul said, “Continue in prayer and, “Pray without ceasing.” He did not mean that people should be always on their knees, but he did mean that our prayers should be like the continual burned-offering steadily preserved in every day; that it should be like seed-time and harvest, and summer and winter, unceasingly coming round at regular seasons; that it should be like the fire on the altar, not always consuming sacrifices, but never completely going out.”

— J. C. Ryle

299. “The very sermon that we needlessly miss, may contain a precious word in season for our souls.”

— J. C. Ryle

300. “It is a true saying of good Archbishop Leighton: ‘The way of sin is down hill; a man cannot stop when he would.”

— J. C. Ryle