Welcome to our collection of quotes by William Booth. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for William Booth
William Booth (10 April 1829 – 20 August 1912) was an English Methodist preacher who, along with his wife, Catherine, founded the Salvation Army and became its first "General" (1878–1912). The Christian movement with a quasi-military structure and government founded in 1865 has spread from London, England, to many parts of the world and is known for being one of the largest distributors of humanitarian aid. In 2002, Booth was named among the 100 Greatest Britons in a BBC poll.
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.
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.
Don't instill, or allow anybody else to instill into the hearts of your girls the idea that marriage is the chief end of life. If you do, don't be surprised if they get engaged to the first empty, useless fool they come across.
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.
You cannot warm the hearts of people with God's love if they have an empty stomach and cold feet.
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.
What is the use of preaching the Gospel to men whose whole attention is concentrated upon a mad, desperate struggle to keep themselves alive?
It is impossible to comfort men's hearts with the love of God when their feet are perishing with cold.
If Moses had operated through committees the Israelites never would have got across the Red Sea.
God loves with a great love the man whose heart is bursting with a passion for the impossible.
While women weep, as they do now, I'll fight.
Longer Version:
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!
If there is anything of power in The Salvation Army today, 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.
While there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I'll fight -- I'll fight to the very end!
Can we go too fast in saving souls? If anyone still wants a reply, let him ask the lost souls in Hell.
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.
Look well to the fire of your souls, for the tendency of fire is to go out.
There is a day coming when there will be a religion without repentance, a salvation without the Holy Ghost, a Heaven without Hell.
Will you go to His feet and place yourself entirely at His disposal?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Without excuse and self-consideration of health or limb or life, true soldiers fight, live to fight, love the thickest of the fight, and die in the midst of it.
I am not waiting for a move of God, I am a move of God!
Work as if everything depended upon work and pray as if everything depended upon prayer.
Why should the devil have all the best tunes?
The greatness of the man's power is the measure of his surrender.
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.
But what is the use of preaching the Gospel to men whose whole attention is concentrated upon a mad, desperate struggle to keep themselves alive?
The profession of a prostitute is the only career in which the maximum income is paid to the newest apprentice.
Longer Version:
The profession of a prostitute is the only career in which the maximum income is paid to the newest apprentice. It is the one calling in which at the beginning the only exertion is that of self-indulgence; all the prizes are at the commencement. It is the ever-new embodiment of the old fable of the sale of the soul to the Devil. The tempter offers wealth, comfort, excitement, but in return the victim must sell her soul, nor does the other party forget to exact his due to the uttermost farthing.
We must wake ourselves up! Or somebody else will take our place, and bear our cross, and thereby rob us of our crown.
The greatness of a man's power is the measure of his surrender.
Go straight for souls, and go for the worst.
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!