Quaker Quotes
“Be still and know that I am God.”
— Psalms 46:10
Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts. Trust them as the leadings of God whose Light shows us our darkness and brings us to new life.
—Advice 1, Britain Yearly Meeting
“Our life is love, and peace, and tenderness; and bearing one with another, and forgiving one another, and not laying accusations one against another; but praying one for another, and helping one another up with a tender hand.”
— Isaac Pennington, 1667
“True godliness don’t turn men out of the world, but better enables them to live in it, and excites their endeavors to mend it; not hide their candle under a bushel, but set it upon a table in a candlestick.”
— William Penn, 1682
“I told them … that I lived in the virtue of that life and power that takes away the occasion of all wars.”
— George Fox, 1651
“The call for honesty lies at the heart of Quakerism. It is a testimony rooted in the Quaker respect for truthfulness. … Respect for this kind of integrity calls for a correspondence between what one professes and how that translates into action in real life.”
— Wilmer Cooper, 1990
“Here we have a prospect of one common interest from which our own is inseparable, that to turn all the treasures we possess into the channel of Universal love becomes the business of our lives.”
— John Woolman, 1772
“The place of prayer is a precious habitation...”
— John Woolman, 1770
How does a Quaker Meeting work? Its foundation is the conviction that God is not a distant remote being but a living presence to be discovered in the deep center of every human being.
… The Quaker experience is that, in the silence, as we are open to one another in love, we help each other by sharing our strengths and weaknesses. The Quaker conviction is that as we go deeper into ourselves we shall eventually reach a still, quiet center. At this point two things happen simultaneously. Each of us is aware of our unique value as an individual human being, and each of us is aware of our utter dependence on one another. — George Gorman, 1982