“The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.”

“POTENTIAL IS A PRICELESS TREASURE, LIKE GOLD. ALL OF US HAVE GOLD HIDDEN WITHIN, BUT WE HAVE TO DIG TO GET IT OUT.”

“When one bears suffering faithfully, God is glorified and honored.”

“Neither past nor future generations can serve God's purpose in this generation. Only we can.”

“We do not stop working and playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop working and playing.”

“All were happy -- plants, birds, insects and children. But grown-up people -- adult men and women -- never left off cheating and tormenting themselves and one another. It was not this spring morning which they considered sacred and important, not the beauty of God's world, given to all creatures to enjoy -- a beauty which inclines the heart to peace, to harmony and to love.”

“And I would shrug and play the question off, unable to confess that I could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly, between faith and simple endurance; that while I believed in the sincerity I heard in their voices, I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won.”

“Involuntarily it appeared to me that there, somewhere, was someone who amused himself by watching how I lived for thirty or forty years: learning, developing, maturing in body and mind, and how, having with matured mental powers reached the summit of life from which it all lay before me, I stood on that summit -- like an arch-fool -- seeing clearly that there is nothing in life, and that there has been and will be nothing. And he was amused... But whether that "someone" laughing at me existed or not, I was none the better off. I could give no reasonable meaning to any single action or to my whole life. I was only surprised that I could have avoided understanding this from the very beginning -- it has been so long known to all. Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come (they had come already) to those I love or to me; nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort?... How can man fail to see this? And how go on living? That is what is surprising! One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.”

“If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata--of creatures that worked like machines--would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.”

“You have been complaining so long about your labour pains. It's time to show us your baby! What at all have you been dreaming about that long? Let's see it and give it a name!”

“When all your efforts are channeled through a common canal for progress, no condition can alter a single sentence of your success story! Dream it; Drive it; Be in focus!”

“[While] disappointment and failure aren’t identical, they often occur together, and both can hold us back from God’s best for our lives.”

“So long as you’re still worried about what others think of you, you are owned by them. Only when you require no approval from outside yourself can you own yourself.”

“The mind has a definite way of clothing one's thoughts in appropriate physical equivalents. Think in terms of poverty and you will live in poverty. Think in terms of opulence and you will attract opulence. Through the eternal law of harmonious attraction, one's thoughts always clothe themselves in material things appropriate unto their nature.”

“When we don’t forgive, we’re not hurting the other person. We’re not hurting the company that did us wrong. We’re not hurting God. We’re only hurting ourselves.”