William Booth Quotes

I am for the world's salvation, I will quarrel with no means that promises help.

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.

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.

It is against stupidity in every shape and form that we have to wage our eternal battle. But how can we wonder at the want of sense on the part of those who have had no advantages, when we see such plentiful absence of that commodity on the part of those who have had all the advantages?

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

Good cookery is not an extravagance but an economy, and many a tasty dish is made by our Continental friends out of materials which would be discarded indignantly by the poorest tramp in Whitechapel.

There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue is abhorrent to them, and so inveterately dishonest that theft is to them a master passion. When a human being has reached that stage, there is only one course that can be rationally pursued. Sorrowfully, but remorselessly, it must be recognized that he has become lunatic, morally demented, incapable of self-government, and that upon him, therefore, must be passed the sentence of permanent seclusion from a world in which he is not fit to be at large.

A man's labor is not only his capital but his life. When it passes it returns never more. To utilize it, to prevent its wasteful squandering, to enable the poor man to bank it up for use hereafter, this surely is one of the most urgent tasks before civilization.

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.

Some of my best men are women!

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!

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

Go straight for souls, and go for the worst.

While there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I'll fight - I'll fight to the very end!

Why should the devil have all the best tunes?

... you cannot make a man clean [simply] by washing his shirt.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue is abhorrent to them, and so inveterably dishonest that theft is to them a master passion.

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

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.

We have to recognise, that the gin-palace, like many other evils, although as poisonous, is still a natural outgrowth of our social conditions. The tap-room in many cases is the poor man's only parlour. Many a man takes to beer, not from the love of beer, but from a natural craving for the light, warmth, company, and comfort which is thrown in along with the beer, and which he cannot get excepting by buying beer. Reformers will never get rid of the drink shop until they can outbid it in the subsidiary attractions which it offers to its customers.

I must assert in the most unqualified way that it is primarily and mainly for the sake of saving the soul that I seek the salvation of the body.

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!

There appears to be a deeply embedded uneasiness in our culture about throwing away junk that can be reused. Perhaps, in part, it is guilt about consumption. Perhaps it also feels unnatural. Mother Nature doesn't throw stuff away. Dead trees, birds, beetles and elephants are pretty quickly recycled by the system.

Look! Don't be deceived by appearances - men and things are not what they seem. All who are not on the rock are in the sea!

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.

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

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 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.

The profession of a prostitute is the only career in which the maximum income is paid to the newest apprentice.

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

Will you go to His feet and place yourself entirely at His disposal?

No sort of defense is needed for preaching outdoors, but it would take a very strong argument to prove that a man who has never preached beyond the walls of his meetinghouse has done his duty. A defense is required for services within buildings rather than for worship outside of them.

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

I will tell you the secret. God has had all there was of me.