Top 60 William Barclay Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There are two great days in a person’s life – the day we are born and the day we discover why.”

— William Barclay

2. “Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.”

— William Barclay

3. “Christian freedom does not mean being free to do as we like; it means being free to do as we ought.”

— William Barclay

4. “True prayer is asking God what He wants.”

— William Barclay

5. “More people have been brought into the church by the kindness of real Christian love than by all the theological arguments in the world.”

— William Barclay

6. “We reverence God and we hallow God’s name when our life is such that it brings honor to God and attracts others to Him.”

— William Barclay

7. “Prayer will never do our work for us; what it will do is to strengthen us for work which must be done.”

— William Barclay

8. “Jesus was clear that He had come, not to make life easy, but to make men great.”

— William Barclay

9. “The best way to prepare for the coming of Christ is never to forget the presence of Christ.”

— William Barclay

10. “In the way of Christ the reward of work well done is more work to do.”

— William Barclay

11. “I thank you for my friends, for those who understand me better than I understand myself. For those who know me at my worst, and still like me. For those who have forgiven me when I had no right to expect to be forgiven. Help me to be as true to my friends as I would wish them to be to me.”

— William Barclay

12. “We have a duty to encourage one another. Many a time a word of praise or thanks or appreciation or cheer has kept a man on his feet. Blessed is the man who speaks such a word.”

— William Barclay

13. “Prayer is not flight, prayer is power. Prayer does not deliver a man from some terrible situation; prayer enables a man to face and to master the situation.”

— William Barclay

14. “Prayer is not a way of making use of God; prayer is a way of offering ourselves to God in order that He should be able to make use of us.”

— William Barclay

15. “Jesus promised his disciples three things – that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.”

— William Barclay

16. “The tragedy of life and of the world is not that men do not know God; the tragedy is that, knowing Him, they still insist on going their own way.”

— William Barclay

17. “True worship is when the spirit, the immortal and invisible part of man, speaks to and meets with God, who is immortal and invisible.”

— William Barclay

18. “Jesus is the yes to every promise of God.”

— William Barclay

19. “To repent means to realize that the kind of life we are living is wrong and that we must adopt a completely new set of values. To that end, it involves two things. It involves sorrow for what we have been and it involves the resolve that by the grace of God we will be changed.”

— William Barclay

20. “In the time we have it is surely our duty to do all the good we can to all the people we can in all the ways we can.”

— William Barclay

21. “The danger of prosperity is that it encourages a false independence.”

— William Barclay

22. “The only way to get our values right is to see, not the beginning, but the end of the way, to see things not only in the light of time but in the light of Eternity.”

— William Barclay

23. “If we are to accept the teaching of Jesus at all, then the only test of the reality of a man’s religion is his attitude to his fellow men. The only possible proof that a man loves God is the demonstrated fact that he loves his fellow men.”

— William Barclay

24. “For the Christian, heaven is where Jesus is. We do not need to speculate on what heaven will be like. It is enough to know that we will be for ever with Him.”

— William Barclay

25. “Religion fails if it cannot speak to men as they are.”

— William Barclay

26. “A saint is someone whose life makes it easier to believe in God.”

— William Barclay

27. “The only victory love can enjoy is the day when its offer of love is answered by the return of love. The only possible final triumph is a universe loved by God and in love with God.”

— William Barclay

28. “God does not choose a person for ease and comfort and selfish joy but for a task that will take all that head and heart and hand can bring to it. God chooses a man in order to use him.”

— William Barclay

29. “There is no joy in the world like the joy of bringing one soul to Christ.”

— William Barclay

30. “Faith is not only a commitment to the promises of Christ; faith is also a commitment to the demands of Christ.”

— William Barclay

31. “There is only one way to bring peace to the heart, joy to the mind, and beauty to the life; it is to accept and do the will of God.”

— William Barclay

32. “The greatest thing is a life of obedience in the routine things of everyday life. No amount of fine feeling can take the place of faithful doing.”

— William Barclay

33. “But the best definition of it is to say that heaven is that state where we will always be with Jesus, and where nothing will separate us from Him any more.”

— William Barclay

34. “So often we have a kind of vague, wistful longing that the promises of Jesus should be true. The only way really to enter into them is to believe them with the clutching intensity of a drowning man.”

— William Barclay

35. “If we find ourselves becoming critical of other people we should stop examining them, and start examining ourselves.”

— William Barclay

36. “The word grace emphasizes at one and the same time the helpless poverty of man and the limitless kindness of God.”

— William Barclay

37. “The essential fact of Christianity is that God thought all men worth the sacrifice of his son.”

— William Barclay

38. “Pride is the ground in which all the other sins grow, and the parent from which all the other sins come.”

— William Barclay

39. “Faith in God is the instrument which enables men and women to remove the hills of difficulty which block their path.”

— William Barclay

40. “Real repentance means that a man has come, not only to be sorry for the consequences of his sin, but to hate sin itself.”

— William Barclay

41. “The people who get the best out of others are those who insist on seeing them at their best.”

— William Barclay

42. “The glory of God is not that of a despotic tyrant, but the splendour of love before which we fall not in abject terror but lost in wonder, love and praise.”

— William Barclay

43. “The simple fact is that the World is too busy to give the Holy Spirit a chance to enter in.”

— William Barclay

44. “We are chosen for joy. However hard the Christian way, it is both in the traveling and in the goal, the way of joy.”

— William Barclay

45. “We will often find compensation if we think more of what life has given us and less about what life has taken away.”

— William Barclay

46. “God tested Abraham. Temptation is not meant to make us fail; it is meant to confront us with a situation out of which we emerge stronger than we were. Temptation is not the penalty of manhood; it is the glory of manhood.”

— William Barclay

47. “Strict orthodoxy can cost too much if it has to be bought at the price of love. All the orthodoxy in the world will never take the place of love.”

— William Barclay

48. “The Christian man must aim at that complete obedience to God in which life finds its highest happiness, its greatest good, its perfect consummation, its peace.”

— William Barclay

49. “Christianity does not think of man finally submitting to the power of God, it thinks of Him as finally surrendering to the love of God. It is not that man’s will is crushed, but that man’s heart is broken.”

— William Barclay

50. “Instead of our petulant, fretful, irritable human hastiness we should cultivate in our souls the patience which has learned to wait on God.”

— William Barclay