Top 15 Adrienne von Speyr Quotes

The Lord gives his whole innocent spirit to the Father and keeps only our own sinful spirit back for himself. In this way he can carry sin as if he himself had committed it.

There is an intensification of negative force at work in the apostate. He resembles a man who works swiftly and surely to erect a wall in order to make the Lord's image, which he knows exactly, disappear and become unrecognizable behind it.

If there had been no Judas, Peter would be the great betrayer. It is only because he stands in the framework of a still greater betrayal that we find a thousand excuses for him and for the faults of the Church continuing and occurring over and over again.

Suffering without faith would be like love without hope.

The ability to suffer and the ability to love are one.

When we sin, we think we are geniuses; when we confess, we know we are idiots.

If there were just one possibility—either to do the good or to combat evil—man would have to opt for the first.

The sins of others can never become the measure of your own.

There is already so much grace in a Christian body. Can you imagine how much grace there is in a soul?

Once a scientific question is settled, it remains interesting and alive only if it draws attention to new questions; every conclusion is meant as a transition to a new beginning.

Whoever wants to love is better knowing nothing than too much.

Christian hope is a vessel in which faith lives; love carries it.

Only faith can keep what hope promises.

The first step in learning to love others is the attempt to understand them.

Ultimate audacity: to want to love a person—to say nothing of one's neighbor!—as God loves him.