Hannah Tatum Whitall Smith was a lay speaker and author in the Holiness movement in the United States and the Higher Life movement in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. She was also active in the Women’s suffrage movement and the Temperance movement. This Hannah Whitall Smith quotes will motivate you.
Best Hannah Whitall Smith Quotes
- “Nothing can separate you from His love, absolutely nothing, neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature… We do not need to beg Him to bless us, He simply cannot help it. Therefore God is enough! God is enough for time, God is enough for eternity. God is enough!” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “Sight is not faith, and hearing is not faith, neither is feeling faith; but believing when we neither see, hear, nor feel is faith; and everywhere the Bible tells us our salvation is to be by faith. Therefore we must believe before we feel, and often against our feelings if we would honor faith.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “To sum it all up, then, what is needed for happy and effectual service is simply to put your work into the Lord’s hands, and leave it there. Do not take it to Him in prayer, saying, “Lord, guide me, Lord, give me wisdom, Lord, arrange for me,” and then arise from your knees and take the burden all back, and try to guide and arrange for yourself. Leave it with the Lord, and remember that what you trust to Him you must not worry over nor feel anxious about. Trust and worry cannot go together.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
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“We must take our troubles to the Lord, but we must do more than that, we must leave them there.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “In the secret of God’s tabernacle no enemy can find us, and no troubles can reach us. The pride of man and the strife of tongues find no entrance into the pavilion of God. The secret of his presence is a more secure refuge than a thousand Gibraltars. I do not mean that no trials come. They may come in abundance, but they cannot penetrate into the sanctuary of the soul, and we may dwell in perfect peace even in the midst of life fiercest storms.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “The mother eagle teaches her little ones to fly by making their nest so uncomfortable that they are forced to leave it and commit themselves to the unknown world of air outside. And just so does our God to us. He stirs up our comfortable nests and pushes us over the edge of them, and we are forced to use our wings to save ourselves from fatal falling. Read your trials in this light, and see if you cannot begin to get a glimpse of their meaning. Your wings are being developed.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “You find no difficulty in trusting the Lord with the management of the universe and all the outward creation, and can your case be any more complex or difficult than these, that you need to be anxious or troubled about His management of it?” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
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“God will help us become the people we are meant to be, if only we will ask Him” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “You have trusted Him as your dying Savior; now trust Him as your living Savior. Just as much as He came to deliver you from future punishment did He also come to deliver you from present bondage. Just as truly as He came to bear your stripes for you has He come to live your life for you.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “No soul can be really at rest until it has given up all dependence on everything else and has been forced to depend on the Lord alone. As long as our expectation is from other things, nothing but disappointment awaits us.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “Remember always that there are two things which are more utterly incompatible even than oil and water, and these two are trust and worry. Can you call it trust, when you have given the saving and keeping of your soul into the hands of God if day after day you are spending hours of anxious thought and questionings about the matter? When believers really trust anything, they cease to worry about the thing they have trusted.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
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“For the mother is and must be, whether she knows it or not, the greatest, strongest and most lasting teacher her children have.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “The Bible is a statement, not of theories, but of actual facts… things are not true because they are in the Bible, but they are only in the Bible because they are true.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “What you need to do, is to put your will over completely into the hands of your Lord, surrendering to Him the entire control of it. Say, “Yes, Lord, YES!” to everything, and trust Him to work in you to will, as to bring your whole wishes and affections into conformity with His own sweet, and lovable, and most lovely will. It is wonderful what miracles God works in wills that are utterly surrendered to Him. He turns hard things into easy, and bitter things into sweet. It is not that He puts easy things in the place of the hard, but He actually changes the hard thing into an easy one.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “Keep your face upturned to Christ as the flowers do to the sun. Look, and your soul shall live and grow” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
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“Put together all the tenderest love you know of, multiply it by infinity, and you will begin to see glimpses of the love and grace of God.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “You must remember that our God has all knowledge and all wisdom and that therefore it is very possible He may guide you into paths wherein He knows great blessings are awaiting you, but which, to the shortsighted human eyes around you, seem sure to result in confusion and loss.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “You must hand yourself and all your inward experiences, your temptations, your temperament, your frames, and feelings, all over into the care of your God, and leave them there. He made you and therefore He understands you, and knows how to manage you, and you must trust Him to do it.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith quotes
- “It is of course evident that everything in one’s religious life depends upon the sort of God one worships. The character of the worshiper must necessarily be molded by the character of the object worshipped. If it is a cruel and revengeful God, or a selfish and unjust God, the worshiper will be cruel, and revengeful, and selfish, and unjust, also. If it is a loving, tender, forgiving, unselfish God, the worshiper will be loving, and tender, and forgiving, and unselfish, as well.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
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“Be not afraid of growing slowly. Be afraid of standing still.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “If we will only surrender ourselves utterly to the Lord, and will trust Him perfectly, we shall find our souls “mounting up with wings as eagles” to the “heavenly places” in Christ Jesus, where earthly annoyances or sorrows have no power to disturb us.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “Nothing else is needed to quiet all your fears, but just this, that GOD IS.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “The time for universal praise is sure to come someday. Let us begin to do our part now.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “Before the acorn can bring forth the oak, it must become itself a wreck. No plant ever came from any but a wrecked seed.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “Nothing else but seeing God in everything can make us loving and patient with those who annoy us. When we realize that they are only the instruments for accomplishing His purpose in our lives, we will actually be able to thank them [inwardly] for the blessings they bring us.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
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“When all else is gone, God is left, and nothing changes Him.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “To be one of God’s lilies means an interior abandonment of the rarest kind. It means that we are to be infinitely passive, and yet infinitely active also; passive as regards self and its workings, active as regards attention and response to God. It is very hard to explain this so as to be understood But it means that we must lay down all the activity of the creature, as such, and must let only the activities of God work in us, and through us, and by us. Self must step aside, to let God work.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith quotes
- “Our God is so wonderfully good, and lovely, and blessed in every way that the mere fact of belonging to Him is enough for an untellable fullness of joy!” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “I saw that the kingdom must be interior before it can be exterior, that it is a kingdom of ideas, and not one of brute force; that His rule is over hearts, not over places; that His victories must be inward before they can be outward; that He seeks to control spirits rather than bodies; that no triumph could satisfy Him but a triumph that gains the heart; that in short, where God really reigns, the surrender must be the interior surrender of the convicted free men, and not merely the outward surrender of the conquered slave.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
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“Those who are God’s without reserve are, in every sense, content” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “Thanks be unto God which always causeth us to triumph in Christ!” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “God’s care for us is more watchful and more tender than the care of any human father could possibly be.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “God’s salvation is not a purchase to be made, nor wages to be earned, nor a summit to be climbed, nor a task to be accomplished, but it is simply and only a gift to be accepted, and can only be accepted by faith.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “Look upon your chastening as God’s chariots sent to carry your soul into the high places of spiritual achievement.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “This way of seeing our Father in everything makes life one long thanksgiving and gives a rest of heart, and, more than that, a gayety of spirit, that is unspeakable.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “Our lives are full of supposes. Suppose this should happen, or suppose that should happen; what could we do; how could we bear it? But, if we are living in the high tower of the dwelling place of God, all these supposes will drop out of our lives. We shall be quiet from the fear of evil, for no threatenings of evil can penetrate into the high tower of God.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
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“Follow the crowd and you will never be followed by a crowd.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “How often we say about our earthly friends, “I really would like to have a good quiet settled talk with them so that I can really get to know them.” And shouldn’t we feel the same about our Heavenly Friend, that we may really get to know Him? These thoughts have taught me the importance of the children of God taking time to commune daily with their Father, so that they may get to know His mind and to understand better what His will is.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “If our hearts are full of our own wretched “I am” we will have no ears to hear His glorious, soul-satisfying “I Am.”” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “If the Lord sets you to guard a lonely post in perfect stillness from all active work, you ought to be just as content as to be in the midst of the active warfare. It is no virtue to love the Master’s work better than the Master’s will.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “If becoming a grandmother was only a matter of choice, I should advise every one of you straight away to become one. There is no fun for old people like it!” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
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“If we want to be comforted, we must make up our minds to believe every single solitary word of comfort God has ever spoken.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “Once I knew what it was to rest upon the rock of God’s promises, and it was indeed a precious resting place, but now I rest in His grace. He is teaching me that the bosom of His love is a far sweeter resting-place than even the rock of His promises.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “Faith, like sight is nothing apart from God. You might as well shut your eyes and look inside, and see whether you have sight as to look inside to discover whether you have faith.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “For the decisions of our will are often so directly opposed to the decisions of our emotions, that, if we are in the habit of considering our emotions as the test, we shall be very apt to feel like hypocrites in declaring those things to be real which our will alone has decided.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “I find that every soul that has travelled on this highway of holiness for any length of time, has invariably cut loose from its old moorings.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
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“Keep your mind on the things you want and off the things you don’t want.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “We were made to be human beings here, and when people try to be anything else, they generally get into some sort of scrapes.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “That cross inmate of your household, who has hitherto made life a burden to you, and who has been the Juggernaut car to crush your soul into the dust, may henceforth be a glorious chariot to carry you to the heights of heavenly patience and long-suffering.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “It is wonderful what miracles God works in wills that are utterly surrendered to Him.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “By faith, the walls of Jericho fell down after they were compassed about seven days.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith quotes
- “Where the soul is full of peace and joy, outward surrounding and circumstances are of comparatively little account.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
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“You can’t get to second base keeping one foot on first.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “Christians, who have given themselves into the care and keeping of the Lord Jesus, still continue to bend beneath the weight of their burden, and often go weary and heavy-laden throughout the whole length of their journey.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “Foundations to be reliable must always be unshakable.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “Let me advise thee not to talk of thyself as being old. There is something in Mind Cure, after all, and if thee continually talks of thyself as being old, thee may perhaps bring on some of the infirmities of age. At least I would not risk it if I were thee.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “It is hard for me to believe that any husband and wife are really happy together. And to have thee say you are is an unspeakable comfort.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “Better and sweeter than health, or friends, or money, or fame, or ease, or prosperity, is the adorable will of our God.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
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“A feeling of real need is always a good enough reason to pray.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “The mother eagle teachers her little ones to fly by making their nest so uncomfortable that they are forced to leave it and commit themselves to the unknown world of air outside. And just so does our God to us.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “Of all hateful occupations, housekeeping is to my mind the most hateful.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “An idea is a curious thing. It will not work unless you do.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith quotes
- “Self-absorption is always a temptation to young people, and if their religion is of a sort to add to this self-absorption, I feel that it is a serious mistake. If I had my way, the whole subject of feelings and emotions in the religious life would be absolutely ignored. Feelings there will be, doubtless, but they must not be in the least depend on, nor in any sense taken as the test or gauge of one’s religion. They ought to be left out of the calculation entirely. You may feel good or you may feel bad, but neither the good feeling nor the bad feeling affects the real thing.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
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“Unless you’re the lead dog, the scenery never changes.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
- “Many Christians still at the bottom look upon God as one of the most selfish, self-absorbed Beings in the universe, far more selfish than they could think it right to be themselves, -intent only upon His own honor and glory, looking out continually that His own rights are never trampled on; and so absorbed in thoughts of Himself and of His own righteousness, as to have no love or pity to spare for the poor sinners who have offended Him.” ~ Hannah Whitall Smith
