If my life is fruitless, it doesn't matter who praises me, and if my life is fruitful, it doesn't matter who criticizes me.

Afflictions make the heart more deep, more experimental, more knowing and profound, and so, more able to hold, to contain, and beat more.

The heart must be beaten or bruised, and then the sweet scent will come out.

Nothing can render affliction so insupportable as the load of sin. Would you then be fitted for afflictions? Be sure to get the burden of your sins laid aside, and then what affliction soever you may meet with will be very easy to you.

Man indeed is the most noble, by creation, of all the creatures in the visible World; but by sin he has made himself the most ignoble.

I am now a man of despair, rejected, abandoned, shut up in this iron cage from which there is no escape.

Temptations, when we meet them at first, are as the lion that reared upon Samson; but if we overcome them, the next time we see them we shall find a nest of honey within them.