Top 100 Richard Baxter Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Lord, I surrender. I am completely overcome by your love.”

— Richard Baxter

2. “Study hard, for the well is deep, and our brains are shallow.”

— Richard Baxter

3. “Holiness is nothing else but the habitual and predominant devotion and dedication of soul, and body, and life, and all that we have to God; and esteeming, and loving, and serving, and seeking Him, before all the pleasures and prosperity of the flesh.”

— Richard Baxter

4. “Nothing can be rightly known, if God be not known; nor is any study well managed, nor to any great purpose, if God is not studied. We know little of the creature, till we know it as it stands related to the Creator.”

— Richard Baxter

5. “If life be long I will be glad, that I may long obey; if short, yet why should I be sad to welcome to endless day?”

— Richard Baxter

6. “Be careful how you spend your time: Spend your time in nothing which you know must be repented of.”

— Richard Baxter

7. “The longer you delay, the more your sin gets strength and rooting. If you cannot bend a twig, how will you be able to bend it when it is a tree?”

— Richard Baxter

8. “Christ leads me through no darker rooms than He went through before.”

— Richard Baxter

9. “Prayer is the breath of the new creature.”

— Richard Baxter

10. “Of all the preaching in the world, I hate that preaching which tends to make the hearers laugh, or to move their minds with tickling levity and affect them as stage plays used to, instead of affecting them with a holy reverence for the name of God.”

— Richard Baxter

11. “Use sin as it will use you; spare it not, for it will not spare you; it is your murderer, and the murderer of the world: use it, therefore, as a murderer should be used. Kill it before it kills you.”

— Richard Baxter

12. “Keep up a humble sense of your own faults, and that will make you compassionate to others.”

— Richard Baxter

13. “A little love has made me willingly study, preach, write, and even suffer...”

— Richard Baxter

14. “We must study as hard how to live well as how to preach well.”

— Richard Baxter

15. “This life was not intended to be the place of our perfection, but the preparation for it.”

— Richard Baxter

16. “Unity in things Necessary, Liberty in things Unnecessary, and Charity in all.”

— Richard Baxter

17. “Take heed to yourselves, lest you perish while you call upon others to take heed of perishing, and lest you famish yourselves while you prepare their food.”

— Richard Baxter

18. “Tomorrow is always the sluggard’s working day; today is his holiday.”

— Richard Baxter

19. “Above all be much in secret prayer and meditation. By this you will fetch the heavenly fire that must kindle your sacrifice: remember you cannot decline and neglect your duty to your own hurt alone, many will be losers by it as well as you.”

— Richard Baxter

20. “To be the people of God without regeneration, is as impossible as to be the children of men without generation.”

— Richard Baxter

21. “Dangers bring fears and fears more dangers bring.”

— Richard Baxter

22. “Life is short, and we are dull, and eternal things are necessary, and the souls that depend on our teaching are precious.”

— Richard Baxter

23. “I did nothing that I might not have done better.”

— Richard Baxter

24. “It is not the reading of many books which is necessary to make a man wise or good, but the well-reading of a few, could he be sure to have the best. And it is not possible to read over many on the same subject without a great deal of loss of precious time.”

— Richard Baxter

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25. “An ounce of mirth is worth a pound of sorrow.”

— Richard Baxter

26. “Screw the truth into men’s minds.”

— Richard Baxter

27. “If family religion were duly attended to and properly discharged, I think the preaching of the Word would not be the common instrument of conversion.”

— Richard Baxter

28. “Lay siege to your sins, and starve them out by keeping away the food and fuel which is their maintenance and life.”

— Richard Baxter

29. “The very design of the gospel doth tend to self-abasing; and the work of grace is begun and carried on in humiliation. Humility is not a mere ornament of a Christian, but an essential part of the new creature: it is a contradiction to be a sanctified man, or a true Christian, and not humble.”

— Richard Baxter

30. “Alas! can we think that the reformation is wrought, when we cast out a few ceremonies, and changed some vestures, and gestures, and forms! Oh no, sirs’! it is the converting and saving of souls that is our business. That is the chiefest part of reformation, that doth most good, and tendeth most to the salvation of the people.”

— Richard Baxter

31. “We are ignorant of things necessary, because we learn things superfluous and unnecessary.”

— Richard Baxter

32. “You are not likely to see any general reformation, till you procure family reformation.”

— Richard Baxter

33. “I have pain; but I have peace, I have peace.”

— Richard Baxter

34. “Speak to your people as to men that must be awakened, either here or in hell...”

— Richard Baxter

35. “Despair of ever being saved, “except thou be born again,” or of seeing God “without holiness,” or of having part in Christ except thou “love him above father, mother, or thy own life.” This kind of despair is one of the first steps to heaven.”

— Richard Baxter

36. “What we most value, we shall think no pains too great to gain.”

— Richard Baxter

37. “If you do not see yourselves and all things as living, moving, and having their being in God, you see nothing, whatever you may think you see.”

— Richard Baxter

38. “Till men are deeply humbled, they can part with Christ and Salvation for a lust, for a little wordly gain, for that which is less than nothing. But when God hath enlightened their consciences, and broken their hearts, then they would give a world for Christ.”

— Richard Baxter

39. “A foolish physician he is, and a most unfaithful friend, that will let a sick man die for fear of troubling him; and cruel wretches are we to our friends, that will rather suffer them to go quietly to hell, then we will anger them, or hazard our reputation with them.”

— Richard Baxter

40. “Suffering so unbolts the door of the heart, that the Word hath easier entrance.”

— Richard Baxter

41. “Is it not enough that all the world is against us, but we must also be against one another? O happy days of persecution, which drove us together in love, whom the sunshine of liberty and prosperity crumbles into dust by our contentions!”

— Richard Baxter

42. “It is not the reading of many books which is necessary to make a man wise or good; but well reading of a few.”

— Richard Baxter

Featured in: Reading Quotes

43. “Nothing below heaven is worth setting our hearts upon.”

— Richard Baxter

44. “Anger is the rising up of the heart in passionate displacency against an apprehended evil, which would cross or hinder us of some desired good.”

— Richard Baxter

45. “A man pleaser cannot be true to God, because he is a servant to the enemies of his service; the wind of a man’s mouth will drive him about as the chaff, from any duty, and to any sin.”

— Richard Baxter

46. “I like to hear a man dwell much on the same essentials of Christianity. For we have but one God, and one Christ, and one faith to preach; and I will not preach another Gospel to please men with variety, as if our Saviour and our Gospel had grown stale.”

— Richard Baxter

47. “Hell is paved with infants skulls.”

— Richard Baxter

48. “I must confess, as the experience of my own soul, that the expectation of loving my friends in heaven principally kindles my love to them while on earth.”

— Richard Baxter

49. “In hell, sinners shall forever lay all the blame on their own wills. Hell is a rational torment by conscience.”

— Richard Baxter

50. “Preach to yourselves the sermons which you study, before you preach them to others.”

— Richard Baxter