Quakerism Quotes

“It is not the different practice from one another that breaks the Peace and Unity, but judging of one another because of differing practices.”
― Isaac Penington

“For the forest, the shared purpose is life itself, existence; everything extraneous stripped away by its necessity. Perhaps the goal of the spiritual life is to strip away everything frivolous as well, to pare it all back to the necessity of connection with the other. If we worship in the sincere presence of that power that takes away our forever-unmet need of things superfluous, we enter the real ecology of the meeting, where all is web.”
― James W. Hood, The Ecology of Quaker Meeting

“Sacrifice, surrender, negation, are inherently involved in any great onwardmarching life. They go with any choice that can be made of a rich and intense life. It is impossible to find without losing, to get without giving, to live without dying. But sacrifice, surrender, negation, are never for their own sake; they are never ends in themselves. They are involved in life itself.”
― Rufus Matthew Jones, The Inner Life

“His [Jesus'] so-called ethics ... is indivisibly bound up with His attitude toward the unseen, with His experience of a realm where what ought to be, really is.”
― Rufus Matthew Jones, The Inner Life

“It is not strange that a synoptic writer reports the saying: 'No man knoweth the Father but the Son.' The passage as it stands reported in Matthew may be colored by later theology, but there is a nucleus of absolute truth hidden in the saying. There is no other way to know God but this way of inner love-experience.”
― Rufus Matthew Jones, The Inner Life

“Throughout her life, Mott criticized those who represented man-made rules as Divine truth, using religious authority to enforce their private interests and personal opinions.”
― Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

“Though it would become fashionable for nineteenth-century feminists in other denominations to drop the promise of obedience in marriage vows, there was no such clause in the Quaker ceremony, because there was no, in Lucretia's words, 'assumed authority or admitted inferiority; no promise of obedience.”
― Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

“In Stanton, Mott won a devoted convert. Elizabeth recalled: 'It seemed to me like meeting a being from some larger planet, to find a woman who dared to question the opinions of Popes, Kings, Synods, Parliaments, with the same freedom she would criticize an editorial in the London Times, recognizing no higher authority than the judgment of a pure-minded, educated woman. When I first heard from the lips of Lucretia Mott that I had the same right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin, and John Knox had, and the same right to be guided by my own convictions, and would no doubt live a higher, happier life than if guided by theirs, I felt at once a new-born sense of dignity and freedom; it was like suddenly coming into the rays of the noon-day sun, after wandering with a rushlight in the caves of the earth.”
― Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

“Mott saw anti-slavery, peace, and women's rights as part of the same reform impulse to liberate the individual from the bonds of tradition, custom, and organized religion.”
― Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America