Jeremy Taylor Quotes

Upon the wings of fasting and alms holy prayer infallibly mounts up to heaven.

Remember that zeal, being an excrescence of divine love, must in no sense contradict any action of love. Love to God includes love to our neighbour; and therefore no pretence of zeal for God’s glory must make us uncharitable to our brother; for that is just so pleasing to God as hatred is an act of love.

This grace (purity of intention) is so excellent that it sanctifies the most common actions of our life and yet is so necessary that without it, the very best actions of our devotion are imperfect and vicious.

And what can be greater than that from the goodness and love of God we receive Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost, and adoption, and the inheritance of sons, and to be coheirs with Jesus, and to have pardon of our sins, and a Divine nature, and restraining grace and the grace of sanctification, and rest and peace within us, and a certain expectation of glory?

If any man be well grown in grace, he must needs come [to receive the Eucharist], because he is excellently disposed to so holy a feast: but he that is but in the infancy of piety had need to come, that so he may grow in grace. The strong must come lest they become weak; and the weak that they may become strong. The sick must come to be cured; the healthful to be preserved.

He that is choice of his time will be choice of his company, and choice of his actions.

...if love hath filled all the corners of our soul, it alone is able to do all the work of God.

But exhortations must prevail with their own proper weight, not by the passion of the speaker.

The first things that hinders the prayer of a good man from obtaining its effects is a violent anger, and a violent storm in the spirit him who prayers.

...for there is some virtue or other to be exercised, whatever happens...

O holy and ever-blessed Spirit, Who didst overshadow the holy Virgin, the mother of our Lord, and caused her to conceive by a miraculous and mysterious manner, be pleased to overshadow my soul, and enlighten my spirit, that I may conceive the holy Jesus in my heart, and may bear Him in my mind, and may grow up to the fulness of the stature of Christ, to be a perfect man in Christ Jesus. Amen.

Let no man appropriate to his own use what God, by a special mercy, or the republic, hath made common; for that is both against justice and charity too; and by miraculous accidents, God hath declared his displeasure against such enclosure.

Love is as communicative as fire, as busy and as active...

Virtue and vice are oftentimes so near neighbours that we pass into each other’s borders without observation, and think we do justice when we are cruel; or call ourselves liberal when we are loose and foolish in expenses; and are amorous when we commend our own civilities and good nature.

Faith, hope, and charity are the best weapons in the world to fight against intemperance.