“I say that man without the grace of God nonetheless remains the general omnipotence of God who effects, and moves and impels all things in a necessary, infallible course; but the effect of man's being carried along is nothing--that is, avails nothing in God's sight, nor is reckoned to be anything but sin.”
Source: On the Bondage of the Will (1525), p. 265
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Martin Luther 214
seminal figure in Protestant Reformation 1483–1546Related quotes

Romans, 3:3-8 -
Epistle to the Romans
Context: What if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect? God forbid: yes, let God be true, but every man a liar; as it is written, That thou mightest be justified in thy sayings, and mightest overcome when thou art judged.
But if our unrighteousness commend the righteousness of God, what shall we say? Is God unrighteous who taketh vengeance? (I speak as a man) God forbid: for then how shall God judge the world? For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory; why yet am I also judged as a sinner? And not rather, (as we be slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say,) Let us do evil, that good may come? whose damnation is just.

“To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing.”
The Essence of Christianity (1841)

(Hudson Taylor’s Choice Sayings: A Compilation from His Writings and Addresses. London: China Inland Mission, n.d., 29).
Variant: All God’s giants have been weak men, who did great things for God because they reckoned on His being with them.

p 43
Costly Grace (1937)

“The man who abides in the will of God wills nothing else than what God is, and what He wills.”
Meister Eckhart’s Sermons (1909)
Context: The man who abides in the will of God wills nothing else than what God is, and what He wills. If he were ill he would not wish to be well. If he really abides in God's will, all pain is to him a joy, all complication, simple: yea, even the pains of hell would be a joy to him. He is free and gone out from himself, and from all that he receives, he must be free. If my eye is to discern colour, it must itself be free from all colour. The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.
Sermon IV : True Hearing