John Calvin

The heart of man is a perpetual idol factory.

The whole life of a Christian should be a meditation on death.

The knowledge of God without the knowledge of ourselves is vain.

Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.

The true way to learn God's will is to listen to his Word.

The grace of God is the only foundation of our salvation.

When God chooses a man, he does not consider what he is, but what he will make him.

The proper knowledge of God is when we know him to be our Father.

This is not laid down on human authority; it is God who speaks and prescribes a perpetual rule for his Church.

I am unwilling to pledge my word for his safety, for if he shall come [to Geneva], I shall never permit him to depart alive, provided my authority be of any avail.

I hope that the verdict will call for the death penalty.

Servetus suffered the penalty due his heresies, but was it by my will. Certainly his arrogance destroyed him not less than his impiety.

It would be indeed better to grant license to thieves and sorcerers and adulterers, than to suffer the blasphemies which the ungodly utter against God, to prevail without any punishment and without any restraint.

The Lord then would have all the godly to burn with so much zeal in the defense of lawful worship and true religion, that no connection, no relationship, nor any other consideration, connected with the flesh, should avail to prevent them from bringing to punishment their neighbors, when they see that God's worship is profaned, and that sound doctrine is corrupted.

We call predestination God's eternal decree, by which he compacted with himself what he willed to become of each man. For all are not created in equal condition; rather, eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others.

The decree is dreadful, I confess. Yet no one can deny that God foreknew what end man was to have before he created him, and consequently foreknew because he so ordained by his decree.

...those whom God passes over [praeterit], he condemns [reprobat]; and this he does for no other reason than that he wills to exclude them from the inheritance which he predestines [praedestinat] for his own children.

Free will is an empty term.

Free-will cannot will good and of necessity serves sin.

For the will is so overwhelmed by wickedness and so pervaded by vice and corruption that it cannot in any way escape to honorable exertion or devote itself to righteousness.