Jeanne Guyon Quotes

We never know how strongly we cling to objects until they are taken away, and he who thinks htat he is attached to nothing, is frequently grandly mistaken, being bound to a thousand things, unknown to himself.

A person truly humbled permits not anything to put him in a rage. As it is pride which dies the last in the soul, so it is passion which is last destroyed in the outward conduct. A soul thoroughly dead to itself, finds nothing of rage left.

If knowing answers to life's questions is absolutely necessary to you, then forget the journey. You will never make it. For this is a journey of unknowables -- of unanswered questions, enigmas, incomprehensibles, and most of all, things unfair.

He destroys that he might build; for when He is about to rear His sacred temple in us, He first totally razes that vain and pompous edifice, which human art and power had erected, and from its horrible ruins a new structure is formed, by His power only.

This spirit gradually decayed, not being nourished by prayer. I became cold toward God.

Pride, a sense of self-importance, and self-reliance must give way to childlikeness and simplicity. JEANNE GUYON

Be patient in prayer, even though you should do nothing all your life but wait in patience, with a heart humbled, abandoned, resigned, and content for the return of your Beloved. Oh, excellent prayer! How it moves the heart of God, and obliges Him to return more than anything else!

I have found it easy to obtain the presence of God. He desires to be more present to us than we desire to seek Him. He desires to give Himself to us far more readily than we desire to receive Him. We only need to know how to seek God, and this is easier and more natural than breathing.

The devil is outrageous only against prayer, and those that exercise it; because he knows it is the true means of taking his prey from him. He lets us undergo all the austerities we will. He neither persecutes those that enjoy them nor those that practice them. But no sooner does one enter into a spiritual life, a life of prayer, but they must prepare for strange crosses. All manner of persecutions and contempts in this world are reserved for that life.

Oh, my God, if the value of prayer were but known, the great advantage which accrues to the soul from conversing with Thee, and what consequence it is of to salvation, everyone would be assiduous in it. It is a stronghold into which the enemy cannot enter. He may attack it, besiege it, make a noise about its walls; but while we are faithful and hold our station, he cannot hurt us.

The devil is outrageous only against prayer, and those that exercise it; because he knows it is the true means of taking his prey from him.

All consolation that does not come from God is but desolation; when the soul has learned to receive no comfort but in God only, it has passed beyond the reach of desolation.

God gives us the cross, and then the cross gives us God.

Prayer is nothing else but the application of the heart to God, and the interior exercise of love.

the direct and principal exercise should be the sense of the presence of God, we must most faithfully recall the senses when they wander.

There are two means by which we may be led into the higher forms of prayer. One is Meditation, the other is Meditative Reading.

Let this, then, be done in you; and suffer not yourself to be attached to anything, however good it may appear; it is no longer such to you, if it in any measure turns you aside from what God desires of you.  For the divine will is preferable to every other good.  Shake off, then, all self-interest, and live by faith and abandonment; here it is that genuine faith begins truly to operate.

63. In this state of Resurrection comes that ineffable silence, by which we not only subsist in God, but commune with Him, and which, in a Soul thus dead to its own working, and general and fundamental Self-appropriation, becomes a flux and reflux of Divine Communion, with nothing to sully its purity; for there is nothing to hinder it. 64. The Soul then becomes a partaker of the ineffable communion of the Trinity, where the Father of Spirits imparts his spiritual fecundity, and makes it one Spirit with Himself.

The only way to Heaven is prayer; a prayer of the heart, which every one is capable of, and not of reasonings which are the fruits of study, or exercise of the imagination, which, in filling the mind with wandering objects, rarely settle it; instead of warming the heart with love to God, they leave it cold and languishing. Let the poor come, let the ignorant and carnal come; let the children without reason or knowledge come, let the dull or hard hearts which can retain nothing come to the practice of prayer and they shall become wise.

It is a small matter, say they; true, but it is of amazing consequence to you; it is a matter that you love well enough to refuse to give it up to God; a matter which you sneer at in words, that you may have a pretence to retain it; a small matter, but one that you withhold from your Maker, and which will prove your ruin.

This prayer is not mental, but of the heart. It is not a prayer of thought alone, because the mind of man is so limited, that while it is occupied with one thing it cannot be thinking of another. But it is the PRAYER OF THE HEART, which cannot be interrupted by the occupations of the mind. Nothing can interrupt the prayer of the heart but unruly affections; and when once we have tasted of the love of God, it is impossible to find our delight in anything but Himself.

He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).

The inward turning to Him is easy, natural and effortless, because He is at your centre. He is drawing you.

To have time for it, I left off prayer which was to me the first inlet of evils.

O Divine Shepherd! Thou feedest Thy sheep with Thine own hand, and Thou art their food from day to day.