Austin Phelps > Quotes

“Wear the old coat and buy the new book.”
― Austin Phelps

“Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.”
― Austin Phelps

“We never feel Christ to be a reality, until we feel Him to be a necessity.”
― Austin Phelps, The Still Hour

“Possibly our hearts are shockingly deceitful in such iniquity. Are we strangers to an experience like this — that when we mourn over our cold prayers as a misfortune, we evade a search of that disputed territory for the cause of them, through fear that we shall find it there, and we struggle to satisfy ourselves with an increase of spiritual duties which shall cost us no sacrifice?”
― Austin Phelps, The Still Hour: Communion with God

“The consciousness of Divine friendship in devotion, so far from being impaired, is deepened by holy veneration. The purest and most lasting human friendships are permeated with an element of reverence; much more this friendship of a man with God.”
― Austin Phelps, The Still Hour

“If we suffer our faith to drop down from the lofty conception of prayer as having a lodgment in the very counsels of God, by which the universe is swayed, the plain practicalness of prayer as the Scriptures teach it, and as prophets and apostles and our Lord himself performed it, drops proportionately; and in that proportion, our motive to prayer dwindles.”
― Austin Phelps, The Still Hour: Communion with God

“The feeling which will become spontaneous with a Christian, under the influence of such a trust, is this: ‘I come to my devotions this morning, on an errand of real life. This is no romance and no farce. I do not come here to go through a form of words. I have no hopeless desires to express. I have an object to gain. I have an end to accomplish. This is a business in which I am about to engage.”
― Austin Phelps, The Still Hour: Communion with God