The Complete Fenelon Quotes

“The chief thing is not to listen to yourself, but silently to give ear to God. It is to renounce all vanity, and apply yourself to real virtue. Talk little, and do much without caring to be seen. God will teach you more than all the most experienced persons or the most spiritual books can do. What is it you want so much to know? What do you need to learn but to be poor in spirit and to find all wisdom in Christ crucified? “Knowledge puffs up.” Only “love builds up.”5 Be content to aim at charity.”
― François Fénelon, The Complete Fenelon

“Is it possible to know you, dear God, and not love you? Your beauty, strength, grandeur, power, and goodness; your generosity, magnificence, and perfection of every kind—these are far beyond what any created being could understand. And what touches me in the depths of my heart is that you love me.”
― François Fénelon, The Complete Fenelon

“There is more danger in the risk of resisting God than in the heaviest of other sorrows. Crosses borne with quiet endurance, lowliness, simplicity, and self-denial unite us to Jesus Christ crucified, and work untold good. But crosses that we reject through thinking too highly of ourselves and through self-will separate us from him, contract the heart, and by degrees dry up the fountain of grace. Yield humbly, therefore, without trusting yourself, mere broken reed that you are, and say, “To him nothing is impossible.” He asks only one “Yes,” spoken in pure faith.”
― François Fénelon, The Complete Fenelon

“When you say, “It is impossible to do what is required of me,” this is a temptation to despair. Despair of yourself as much as you please, but not of God.”
― François Fénelon, The Complete Fenelon

“Why do we rebel against our prolonged trials? Because of self-love; and it is that very self-love that God purposes to destroy. As long as we cling to self, his work is not achieved.”
― François Fénelon, The Complete Fenelon

“A heated imagination, strong feelings, a world of argument, and a flow of words are really useless. The practical thing is to act in a spirit of detachment, doing what we can by God’s light, and being content with such success as he gives.”
― François Fénelon, The Complete Fenelon

“Do not let your natural activity consume you amid the irksome details around you. You cannot take too many pains to subdue”
― François Fénelon, The Complete Fenelon

“It is false humility to believe ourselves unworthy of God’s goodness and to not dare to look to him with trust.”
― François Fénelon, The Complete Fenelon

“The greater our own self-love, the more severe critics we will be. Nothing is so offensive to a haughty, sensitive self-conceit as the self-conceit of others.”
― François Fénelon, The Complete Fenelon

“THE DANGERS OF HUMAN PRAISE Showing sorrow for sin and undergoing other humiliating circumstances are far more profitable than success. You know that your troubles made you find out what you never knew before about yourself, and I am afraid that the authority, the success, and the admiration that have now come your way will make you self-satisfied. Such self-satisfaction will mar the best-ordered life, because it is incompatible with humility. We can be humble only so long as we give attention to all our own infirmities. The consciousness of these should be predominant; the soul should feel burdened by them and groan under them, and that groaning should be as a perpetual prayer to be set free from “its bondage to decay,” and admitted into the “glorious freedom of the children of God.” 3 Overwhelmed by its own faults, the soul should feel it deserves no deliverance by the great mercy of Jesus Christ. Woe to the soul that is self-satisfied, that treats God’s gifts as its own merits, and forgets what is due to God! Set apart regular seasons for reading and prayer. Involve yourself in outward matters when it is really necessary, and attend more to softening the harshness of your judgment, to restraining your temper, and to humbling your mind than to upholding your opinion even when it is right. Finally, humble yourself whenever you find that an undue interest in the affairs of others has led you to forget the one all-important matter of yourself: eternity.”
― François Fénelon, The Complete Fenelon