William Booth Quotes

I consider that the chief dangers which confront the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, and heaven without hell.

You cannot warm the hearts of people with God's love if they have an empty stomach and cold feet.

Most Christians would like to send their recruits to Bible college for five years. I would like to send them to hell for five minutes. That would do more than anything else to prepare them for a lifetime of compassionate ministry.

I am not waiting for a move of God, I am a move of God!

If you want to change the future, then you are going to have to trouble the present.

While women weep, as they do now, I'll fight While little children go hungry, as they do now, I'll fight While men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I'll fight While there is a drunkard left, While there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, While there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I'll fight-I'll fight to the very end!

The tendency of fire is to go out; watch the fire on the altar of your heart. Anyone who has tended a fireplace fire knows that it needs to be stirred up occasionally.

Some men's passion is for gold. some men's passion is for art. some men's passion is for fame. my passion is for souls

The greatness of a man's power is the measure of his surrender.

Faith and works should travel side by side, step answering to step, like the legs of men walking. First faith, and then works; and then faith again, and then works again--until they can scarcely distinguish which is the one and which is the other.

Your days at the most cannot be very long, so use them to the best of your ability for the glory of God and the benefit of your generation.

If Moses had operated through committees the Israelites never would have got across the Red Sea.

You must pray with all your might. That does not mean saying your prayers, or sitting gazing about in church or chapel with eyes wide open while someone else says them for you. It means fervent, effectual, untiring wrestling with God. This kind of prayer be sure the devil and the world and your own indolent, unbelieving nature will oppose. They will pour water on this flame.

I will tell you the secret: God has had all that there was of me. There have been men with greater brains than I, even with greater opportunities, but from the day I got the poor of London on my heart and caught a vision of what Jesus Christ could do with me and them, on that day I made up my mind that God should have all of William Booth there was. And if there is anything of power in the Salvation Army, it is because God has had all the adoration of my heart, all the power of my will, and all the influence of my life.

God loves with a great love the man whose heart is bursting with a passion for the impossible.

If I thought I could win one more soul to the Lord by walking on my head and playing the tambourine with my toes, I'd learn how!

Put your ear down to the Bible, and hear Him bid you go and pull sinners out of the fire of sin. Put your ear down to the burdened, agonized heart of humanity, and listen to its pitiful wail for help.

I must go, not only to those who need me, but to those who need me most.

There is a day coming when there will be a religion without repentance, a salvation without the Holy Ghost, a Heaven without Hell.

To get a man soundly saved it is not enough to put on him a pair of new breeches, to give him regular work, or even to give him a University education. These things are all outside a man, and if the inside remains unchanged you have wasted your labor. You must in some way or other graft upon the man's nature a new nature, which has in it the element of the Divine.

Look well to the fire of your souls, for the tendency of fire is to go out.

Secular music, do you say, belongs to the devil? Does it? Well, if it did I would plunder him for it, for he has no right to a single note of the whole seven. Every note, and every strain, and every harmony is divine, and belongs to us.

Some of my best men are women!

We must wake ourselves up! Or somebody else will take our place, and bear our cross, and thereby rob us of our crown.

Go straight for souls, and go for the worst.