Quotes by Frederick William Faber

“I reckon failure to be the most universal unhappiness on earth. Almost everybody and everything are failures”

“Even a well-founded suspicion more or less degrades a man. His suspicion may be verified, and he may escape some material harm by having cherished the suspicion. But he is unavoidably the worse man in consequence of having entertained it.””

“Her sorrows went up into regions of sublimity, of which we can form only the vaguest conceptions. They went down into profound depths of the soul, which we cannot explore because they have no parallel in ourselves. They were heightened by the unappreciable perfection of her nature, by the exuberant abundance of her grace, by the exceeding beauty of Jesus, and above all by His Divinity.””

“We are already acquainted with the phenomena of the growing sensitiveness of conscience. We know how we come to see sin, where we saw none before, and what a feeling of insecurity about the past that new vision has often given us. Yet death is a sudden stride into the light. Even in our General Confessions, the past was discernible in a kind of soft twilight; now it will be dragged out into unsheltered splendour. The dawn of the judgment, mere dawn though it will be, is brighter than any terrestrial noon; and it is a light which magnifies more than any human microscope. There lie fifty crowded years, or more. O, such an interminable-seeming waste of life, with actions piled on actions, and all swarming with minutest incredible life, and an element of eternity in every nameless moving point of that teeming wilderness! How colossal will appear the sins we know of, so gigantic now that we hardly know them again! How big our little sins! How full of malice our faults that seemed but half-sins, if they were sins at all. Then again, the forgotten sins, who can count them? Who believed they were half so many or half so serious? The unsuspected sins, and the sinfulness of our many ignorances, and the deliberateness of our indeliberations, and the rebellions of our self-will, and the culpable recklessness of our precipitations, and the locust-swarms of our thought-peopled solitudes, and the incessant persevering cataracts of our poisoned tongues, and the inconceivable arithmetic of our multiplied omissions”

“He that is a slave to Lilliputian comforts will find a giant behind the curtains of his deathbed, who is not unlikely to strangle him in the weakness of that hour of retribution.””

“Sorrow is a sanctuary as long as self is kept outside. [...] let us not foster, embrace, rekindle and indulge our grief. For then our sorrow is a selfish and luxurious fiction, a ground in which the Holy Spirit will not dig.””

“The religious man is the only successful man. Nothing fails with him. Every shaft reaches the mark, if the mark be God. He has wasted no energies. Every hope has been fulfilled beyond expectations. Every effort has been even disproportionately rewarded. Every means has turned out marvelously to be an end, because it had God in it, who is our single end. In piety, every battle is a victory, simply because it is a battle. The completest defeats have somewhat of triumph in them; for it is a positive triumph to have stood up and fought for God at all. In short, no life is a failure which is lived for God; and all lives are failures which are lived for any other end.””

“Jesus Christ yesterday, and today, and the same forever! These words of the apostle express at once the noblest and the most delightful occupation of our lives. To think, to speak, to write perpetually of the grandeurs of Jesus - what joy on earth is like it, when we think of what we owe to him, and of the relation in which we stand to him? Who can weary of it? The subject is continually growing before our eyes. It draws us on. It is a science the fascination of which increases the more deeply we penetrate into its depths. That which is to be our occupation in eternity usurps more and more with sweet encroachments the length and breadth of time.””

“Neither indeed if they had been left, when Easter passed, could we have worshipped them with divine worship; for they had already ceased to be the Precious Blood. Whatever Jesus did not reunite to himself in the Resurrection remained disunited from the Person of the Word forever, and therefore, however venerable, had no claim to adoration. But, had we been in Jerusalem on the Friday and the Saturday, we should have found objects, or rather the multiplied presence of an object, of dreadest worship everywhere.””

“There are many who call themselves after the name of Christ, who are yet outside the Church of Christ. Theirs is in every way a woeful lot. To be so near Jesus, and yet not to be of his blessed fold,”

“To feel that we are fools, and yet lack the strength to be wiser,”