Top 40 John Vianney Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you invoke the Blessed Virgin when you are tempted, she will come at once to your help, and Satan will leave you.”

— John Vianney

2. “Do not try to please everybody. Try to please God, the angels, and the saints – they are your public.”

— John Vianney

3. “God commands you to pray, but forbids you to worry.”

— John Vianney

4. “When we have been to Holy Communion, the balm of love envelops the soul as the flower envelops the bee.”

— John Vianney

5. “It is always springtime in the heart that loves God.”

— John Vianney

6. “A priest goes to Heaven or a priest goes to Hell with a thousand people behind.”

— John Vianney

7. “All that we do without offering it to God is wasted.”

— John Vianney

8. “Upon receiving Holy Communion, the Adorable Blood of Jesus Christ really flows in our veins and His Flesh is really blended with ours.”

— John Vianney

9. “Almighty God sends no trial without consolation.”

— John Vianney

10. “The Lord is more anxious to forgive our sins than a woman is to carry her baby out of a burning building.”

— John Vianney

11. “Only after the Last Judgment will Mary get any rest; from now until then, she is much too busy with her children.”

— John Vianney

12. “Our Guardian Angels are our most faithful friends, because they are with us day and night, always and everywhere. We ought often to invoke them.”

— John Vianney

13. “Our body is a vessel of corruption; it is meant for death and for the worms, nothing more! And yet we devote ourselves to satisfying it, rather than to enriching our soul, which is so great that we can conceive nothing greater – no, nothing, nothing!”

— John Vianney

14. “The man of impure speech is a person whose lips are but an opening and a supply pipe which hell uses to vomit its impurities upon the earth.”

— John Vianney

15. “When we receive Holy Communion, we experience something extraordinary – a joy, a fragrance, a well-being that thrills the whole body and causes it to exalt.”

— John Vianney

16. “The saints had no hatred, no bitterness; they forgive everything and think they deserve much more for their offenses against God.”

— John Vianney

17. “Prayer is the inner bath of love into which the soul plunges itself.”

— John Vianney

18. “If you find it impossible to pray, hide behind your good Angel and charge him to pray in your stead.”

— John Vianney

19. “The first thing about the angels that we ought to imitate, is their consciousness of the Presence of God.”

— John Vianney

20. “How sweet it is to die if one has lived on the Cross!”

— John Vianney

21. “If only we could see the joy of our guardian angel when he sees us fighting our temptations!”

— John Vianney

22. “If you are attached to the things of this earth, you should give alms sufficient to enable you to punish your avarice by depriving yourself of all that is not absolutely necessary for life.”

— John Vianney

23. “Private prayer is like straw scattered here and there: If you set it on fire it makes a lot of little flames. But gather these straws into a bundle and light them, and you get a mighty fire, rising like a column into the sky; public prayer is like that.”

— John Vianney

24. “On this path, it is only the first step that counts.”

— John Vianney

25. “To serve the Queen of Heaven is already to reign there, and to live under her commands is more than to govern.”

— John Vianney

26. “You either belong wholly to the world or wholly to God.”

— John Vianney

27. “Humility is like a pair of scales: the lower one side falls, the higher rises the other. Let us humble ourselves like the Blessed Virgin and we shall be exalted.”

— John Vianney

28. “There is nothing so great as the Eucharist. If God had something more precious, He would have given it to us.”

— John Vianney

29. “How happy is that guardian angel who accompanies a soul to Holy Mass!”

— John Vianney

30. “When our hands have touched spices, they give fragrance to all they handle. Let us make our prayers pass through the hands of the Blessed Virgin. She will make them fragrant.”

— John Vianney

31. “There were two saints in the desert, who had sewed thorns into all their clothes; and we seek for nothing but comfort!”

— John Vianney

32. “The pure soul is a beautiful rose, and the Three Divine Persons descend from Heaven to inhale its fragrance.”

— John Vianney

33. “The Devil writes down our sins – our Guardian Angel all our merits. Labor that the Guardian Angel’s book may be full, and the Devil’s empty.”

— John Vianney

34. “Christian wife! Follow in the footsteps of the ideal of all womanhood, the Blessed Mother of God; in joy and in sorrow, she will be your advocate at the throne of her Son.”

— John Vianney

35. “Shall we all be saved? Shall we go to Heaven? Alas, my children, we do not know at all! But I tremble when I see so many souls lost these days. See, they fall into Hell as leaves fall from the trees at the approach of winter.”

— John Vianney

36. “We ought to ask the Blessed Virgin, the angels, and the saints to pray for us that we may receive the good God as worthily as it is possible for us to receive him.”

— John Vianney

37. “Oh, how I like those little mortifications that are seen by nobody, such as rising a quarter of an hour sooner, rising for a little while in the night to pray!”

— John Vianney

38. “Put a good bunch of grapes under the winepress, and a delicious juice will come out. Under the winepress of the cross, our soul produces a juice that feeds and strengthens us. When we haven’t got any crosses, we are dry. If we carry them with resignation, what happiness, what sweetness we feel!”

— John Vianney

39. “Sin is the assassin of the soul.”

— John Vianney

40. “If people would do for God what they do for the world, what a great number of Christians would go to Heaven.”

— John Vianney

41. “Have you been working on Sunday? Have you been buying or selling without necessity in the course of this holy day? Give to the poor some alms which will exceed the profit you have made.”

— John Vianney

42. “I thought a time would come when people would rout me out of Ars with sticks, when the Bishop would suspend me, and I should end my days in prison. I see, however, that I am not worthy of such a grace.”

— John Vianney