“When I preach—no matter where it is in the world—I can always count on five areas of human need that afflict all peoples. Emptiness, loneliness, guilt, fear of death, deep-seated insecurity.”

“As a Christian, I believe that we are all created in the image of God. I believe that God loves the whole world . . .The life of no human being is cheap in the eyes of God, nor can it be in our own eyes.”

“Faith implies four things: self-renunciation, reliance with utter confidence on Christ, obedience, and a changed life.”

“Grief is the price of victory,”

“Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of--something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possesed your soul have been but hints of it--tantalizing glimspes, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the things we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”

“Passion towards a dream is the fuel that fires every trace of impossibility in the environment, paving way for you to win with style.”

“Levin had been married three months. He was happy, but not at all in the way he had expected to be. At every step he found his former dreams disappointed, and new, unexpected surprises of happiness. He was happy; but on entering upon family life he saw at every step that it was utterly different from what he had imagined. At every step he experienced what a man would experience who, after admiring the smooth, happy course of a little boat on a lake, should get himself into that little boat. He saw that it was not all sitting still, floating smoothly; that one had to think too, not for an instant to forget where one was floating; and that there was water under one, and that one must row; and that his unaccustomed hands would be sore; and that it was only to look at it that was easy; but that doing it, though very delightful, was very difficult.”

“The only way to smile at harvest time is to appreciate the invisible fruits in the visible seed. Hungry people are not those who have no seed. They are those who kill seeds!”

“You’ll not have any better standing with God when you get to Heaven than you do right now.”

“Faith is loved and honored by God more than any other single thing.”

“Forgive as often as you must and don’t put limits on it.”

“He says that you have gifts and talents and abilities; you are capable; anything He asks you to do you can do; you are strong in the Lord and not weak; you are forgiven; and on and on and on.”

“I have been known as a crank, faddist, madman. Evidently the reputation is well deserved. For wherever I go, I draw to myself cranks, faddists, and madmen.”

“No matter how dark and hopeless a situation might seem, never stop praying.”

“I believe that just as everyone inherits a particular form so does he inherit the particular characteristics and qualities of his progenitors, and to make this admission is to conserve one's energy.”