16 Quotes by Jean Baptiste Massillon

Agreeable advice is seldom useful advice.

To be proud and inaccessible is to be timid and weak.

I love a serious preacher, who speaks for my sake and not for his own; who seeks my salvation, and not his own vain glory. He best deserves to be heard who uses speech only to clothe his thoughts, and his thoughts only to promote truth and virtue.

Time is short, your obligations are infinite. Are your houses regulated, your children instructed, the afflicted relieved, the poor visited, the work of piety accomplished?

Every effort is made in forming matrimonial alliances to reconcile matters relating to fortune, but very little is paid to the congeniality of dispositions, or to the accordance of hearts.

Our acts of kindness we reserve for our friends, our bounties for our dependants, our riches for our children and relations, our praises for those who appear worthy of them, our time we give all to the world; we expose it, I may say, a prey to all mankind.

We die every day; every moment deprives us of a portion of life and advances us a step toward the grave; our whole life is only along and painful sickness.

God should be the object of all our desires, the end of all our actions, the principle of all our affections, and the governing power of our whole souls.

Slander is perhaps the only vice which no circumstance can palliate, as well as being one which we are most ingenious in concealing from ourselves.