Top 40 William Booth Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I am not waiting for a move of God, I am a move of God!”

— William Booth

Featured in: Impact Quotes, Awakening Quotes, Changing the World Quotes, Moving Quotes

2. “Your days at the most cannot be very long, so use them to the best of your ability for the glory of God and the benefit of your generation.”

— William Booth

3. “While there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I’ll fight – I’ll fight to the very end!”

— William Booth

4. “I consider that the chief dangers which confront the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, and heaven without hell.”

— William Booth

5. “The greatness of a man’s power is the measure of his surrender.”

— William Booth

6. “Most Christians would like to send their recruits to Bible college for five years. I would like to send them to hell for five minutes. That would do more than anything else to prepare them for a lifetime of compassionate ministry.”

— William Booth

7. “You cannot warm the hearts of people with God’s love if they have an empty stomach and cold feet.”

— William Booth

8. “Some men’s passion is for gold. some men’s passion is for art. some men’s passion is for fame. my passion is for souls.”

— William Booth

9. “If there is anything of power in The Salvation Army today, it is because God has had all the adoration of my heart, all the power of my will, and all the influence of my life.”

— William Booth

10. “Secular music, do you say, belongs to the devil? Does it? Well, if it did I would plunder him for it, for he has no right to a single note of the whole seven. Every note, and every strain, and every harmony is divine, and belongs to us.”

— William Booth

11. “If you want to change the future, then you are going to have to trouble the present.”

— William Booth

12. “Some of my best men are women!”

— William Booth

13. “If Moses had operated through committees the Israelites never would have got across the Red Sea.”

— William Booth

14. “I will tell you the secret. God has had all there was of me.”

— William Booth

15. “Look well to the fire of your souls, for the tendency of fire is to go out.”

— William Booth

16. “God loves with a great love the man whose heart is bursting with a passion for the impossible.”

— William Booth

17. “The tendency of fire is to go out; watch the fire on the altar of your heart. Anyone who has tended a fireplace fire knows that it needs to be stirred up occasionally.”

— William Booth

18. “Faith and works should travel side by side, step answering to step, like the legs of men walking. First faith, and then works; and then faith again, and then works again – until they can scarcely distinguish which is the one and which is the other.”

— William Booth

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

19. “What is the use of preaching the Gospel to men whose whole attention is concentrated upon a mad, desperate struggle to keep themselves alive?”

— William Booth

20. “If I thought I could win one more soul to the Lord by walking on my head and playing the tambourine with my toes, I’d learn how!”

— William Booth

21. “I must go, not only to those who need me, but to those who need me most.”

— William Booth

22. “Will you go to His feet and place yourself entirely at His disposal?”

— William Booth

23. “Why should the devil have all the best tunes?”

— William Booth

24. “Put your ear down to the Bible, and hear Him bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help.”

— William Booth

25. “It is impossible to comfort men’s hearts with the love of God when their feet are perishing with cold.”

— William Booth

26. “Without excuse and self-consideration of health or limb or life, true soldiers fight, live to fight, love the thickest of the fight, and die in the midst of it.”

— William Booth

27. “While women weep, as they do now, I’ll fight...”

— William Booth

28. “Go straight for souls, and go for the worst.”

— William Booth

29. “Can we go too fast in saving souls? If anyone still wants a reply, let him ask the lost souls in Hell.”

— William Booth

30. “Before we go to our knees to receive the Baptism of Fire, let me beg of you to see to it that your souls are in harmony with the will and purpose of the Holy Spirit whom you seek.”

— William Booth

31. “There is a day coming when there will be a religion without repentance, a salvation without the Holy Ghost, a Heaven without Hell.”

— William Booth

32. “No sort of defense is needed for preaching outdoors, but it would take a very strong argument to prove that a man who has never preached beyond the walls of his meetinghouse has done his duty. A defense is required for services within buildings rather than for worship outside of them.”

— William Booth

Featured in: Strong Quotes

33. “There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue is abhorrent to them, and so inveterably dishonest that theft is to them a master passion.”

— William Booth

34. “Don’t instill, or allow anybody else to instill into the hearts of your girls the idea that marriage is the chief end of life. If you do, don’t be surprised if they get engaged to the first empty, useless fool they come across.”

— William Booth

35. “It is against stupidity in every shape and form that we have to wage our eternal battle. But how can we wonder at the want of sense on the part of those who have had no advantages, when we see such plentiful absence of that commodity on the part of those who have had all the advantages?”

— William Booth

36. “A man’s labor is not only his capital but his life. When it passes it returns never more. To utilize it, to prevent its wasteful squandering, to enable the poor man to bank it up for use hereafter, this surely is one of the most urgent tasks before civilization.”

— William Booth

37. “I am for the world’s salvation, I will quarrel with no means that promises help.”

— William Booth

38. “Good cookery is not an extravagance but an economy, and many a tasty dish is made by our Continental friends out of materials which would be discarded indignantly by the poorest tramp in Whitechapel.”

— William Booth

39. “I must assert in the most unqualified way that it is primarily and mainly for the sake of saving the soul that I seek the salvation of the body.”

— William Booth

40. “The profession of a prostitute is the only career in which the maximum income is paid to the newest apprentice.”

— William Booth

41. “The rescued are appallingly few – a ghastly minority compared with the multitudes who struggle and sink in the open-mouthed abyss.”

— William Booth