Top 60 William Law Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead.”

— William Law

2. “If you attempt to talk with a dying man about sports or business, he is no longer interested. He now sees other things as more important. People who are dying recognize what we often forget, that we are standing on the brink of another world.”

— William Law

3. “We must alter our lives in order to alter our hearts, for it is impossible to live one way and pray another.”

— William Law

4. “If anyone would tell you the shortest, surest way to all happiness and all perfection, he must tell you to make a rule to yourself to thank and praise God for everything that happens to you.”

— William Law

5. “The greatest saint in the world is not he who prays most or fasts most; it is not he who gives alms, or is most eminent for temperance, chastity or justice. It is he who is most thankful to God.”

— William Law

6. “All that is sweet, delightful, and amiable in this world, in the serenity of the air, the fineness of seasons, the joy of light, the melody of sounds, the beauty of colors, the fragrancy of smells, the splendor of precious stones, is nothing else but Heaven breaking through the veil of this world.”

— William Law

7. “God smiles when we praise and thank Him continually. Few things feel better than receiving heartfelt praise and appreciation from someone else. God loves it, too. An amazing thing happens when we offer praise and thanksgiving to God. When we give God enjoyment, our own hearts are filled with joy.”

— William Law

8. “Nothing harms or destroys us but the wrong use of that liberty of choice which God has entrusted to us.”

— William Law

9. “Love has no errors, for all errors are the want for love.”

— William Law

10. “If someone is leaving you behind, and you are becoming jealous and embittered, keep praying that he may have success in the very matter where he is awakening your envy; and whether he is helped or not, one thing is sure, that your own soul will be cleansed and ennobled.”

— William Law

11. “Now if you will stop here and ask yourself why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.”

— William Law

12. “Be intent upon the perfection of the present day.”

— William Law

13. “He who complains of the weather, complains of the God who ordained the weather!”

— William Law

14. “If our life is not a course of humility, self-denial, renunciation of the world, poverty of spirit, and heavenly affection, we do not live the lives of Christians.”

— William Law

15. “The sun meets not the springing bud that stretches towards him with half the certainty that God, the source of all good, communicates himself to the soul that longs to partake of him.”

— William Law

16. “He who has learned to pray has learned the greatest secret of a holy and happy life.”

— William Law

17. “When therefore the first spark of a desire after God arises in thy soul, cherish it with all thy care, give all thy heart into it; it is nothing less than a touch of the divine loadstone, that is to draw thee out of the vanity of time, into the riches of eternity.”

— William Law

18. “Self is the root, the tree, and the branches of all the evils of our fallen state.”

— William Law

19. “Faith is not a notion, but a real strong essential hunger, an attracting or magnetic desire of Christ, which as it proceeds from a seed of the divine nature in us, so it attracts and unites with its like.”

— William Law

20. “A lack of this complete submission to the will of God, and a failure to realize that our salvation can only be worked out by the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit forming the very life of Christ within the redeemed heart, has placed the Christian church today in the same apostasy that characterized the Jewish nation.”

— William Law

21. “Hell is nothing else but nature departed or excluded from the beam of divine light.”

— William Law

22. “All people desire what they believe will make them happy. If a person is not full of desire for God, we can only conclude that he is engaged with another happiness.”

— William Law

23. “As all types and figures in the Law were but empty shadows without the coming of Christ, so the New Testament is but a dead letter without the Holy Spirit in redeemed men as the living power of a full salvation.”

— William Law

24. “This, and this alone, is Christianity, a universal holiness in every part of life, a heavenly wisdom in all our actions, not conforming to the spirit and temper of the world but turning all worldly enjoyments into means of piety and devotion to God.”

— William Law

25. “From morning to night keep Jesus in thy heart, long for nothing, desire nothing, hope for nothing but to have all that is within thee changed into the spirit and temper of the holy Jesus.”

— William Law

26. “Never, therefore, allow yourselves to despise those who do not follow your rules of life: but force your hearts to love them, and pray to God for them; and let humility be always whispering it into your ears, that you yourselves would fall from those rules to-morrow, if God should leave you to your own strength and wisdom.”

— William Law

27. “Divine love is perfect peace and joy, it is a freedom from all disquiet, it is all content and happiness; and makes everything to rejoice in itself.”

— William Law

28. “Men are not in hell because God is angry with them. They are in wrath and darkness because they have done to the light, which infinitely flows forth from God, as that man does to the light who puts out his own eyes .”

— William Law

29. “Receive every day as a resurrection from death, as a new enjoyment of life.”

— William Law

30. “You are to think of yourself as only existing in this world to do God’s will. To think that you are your own is as absurd as to think you are self-created. It is an obvious first principle that you belong completely to God.”

— William Law

31. “The will is that which has all power; it makes heaven and it makes hell: for there is no hell but where the will of the creature is turned from God, nor any heaven but where the will of the creature worketh with God.”

— William Law

32. “Read whatever chapter of scripture you will, and be ever so delighted with it – yet it will leave you as poor, as empty and unchanged as it found you unless it has turned you wholly and solely to the Spirit of God, and brought you into full union with and dependence upon him.”

— William Law

33. “All our salvation consists in the manifestation of the nature, life and spirit of Jesus Christ in our inward new man. This alone is Christian redemption, this alone delivers from the guilt and power of sin, this alone redeems and renews.”

— William Law

34. “True Christianity is nothing but the continual dependence upon God through Christ for all life, light, and virtue; and the false religion of Satan is to seek that goodness from any other source. So.”

— William Law

35. “The merit of persons is to be no rule of our charity, but we are to do acts of kindness to those that least deserve it.”

— William Law

36. “Wherever Christ is not, there is the Wrath of Nature or Nature left to itself and its own tormenting Strength of Life, to feel nothing in itself but the vain, restless Contrariety of its own working Properties.”

— William Law

37. “We may justly condemn ourselves as the greatest sinners we know because we know more of the folly of our own heart than we do of other people’s.”

— William Law

38. “Feasts and business and pleasure and enjoyments seem great things to us, whilst we think of nothing else; but as soon as we add death to them they all sink into an equal littleness.”

— William Law

39. “Death is not more certainly a separation of our souls from our bodies than the Christian life is a separation of our souls from worldly tempers, vain indulgences, and unnecessary cares.”

— William Law

40. “Until we are renewed in the spirit of our mind and illumined in every part, our very virtues are but taught practices grafted upon a corrupt bottom.”

— William Law

41. “The obedience of men is to imitate the obedience of angels, and rational beings on earth are to live unto God, as rational beings in heaven live unto Him.”

— William Law

42. “No education can be of true advantage to young women but that which trains them up in humble industry, in great plainness of living, in exact modesty of dress.”

— William Law

43. “God seeth different abilities and frailties of men, which may move His goodness to be merciful to their different improvements in virtue.”

— William Law

44. “If I am seeking everything that can delight my senses, and regale my appetites; spending my time and fortune in pleasures, in diversions, and worldly enjoyments; a stranger to watchings, fastings, prayers, and mortification; how can it be said that I am working out my salvation with fear and trembling?”

— William Law

45. “The more we pay for any truth, the better is our bargain.”

— William Law

46. “Perfection does not consist in any singular state or condition of life, or in any particular set of duties, but in holy and religious conduct of ourselves in every state of Life.”

— William Law

47. “Ask what Time is, it is nothing else but something of eternal duration become finite, measurable and transitory.”

— William Law

48. “If contempt of the world and heavenly affection is a necessary temper of christians, it is necessary that this temper appear in the whole course of their lives, in their manner of using the world, because it can have no place anywhere else.”

— William Law

49. “Joseph has lately endeavored to seduce my wife, and has found her a virtuous woman.”

— William Law

50. “What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?”

— William Law