“If more government is the answer, then it was a really stupid question.”

“Whatever is difficult for you become easy if you take a bite of it every day. Try again and again!”

“Whatever you believe, with feeling, becomes your reality.”

“Fear is a self-imposed prison that will keep you from becoming what God intends for you to be.”

“Cheerfulness is a sign of a generous and mortified person who forgetting all things, even herself, tries to please her God in all she does for souls. Cheerfulness is often a cloak which hides a life of sacrifice and a continual union with God.”

“The darkest night in someone's life may be the brightest day in another person's life. Life rests on perceptions and conceptions or missed perceptions and misconceptions. You can choose to make good things out of every challenging circumstance. In contrast, you can also choose to see nothing in a creative opportunity.”

“Bring the mind into sharp focus and make it alert so that it can immediately intuit truth, which is everywhere. The mind must be emancipated from old habits, prejudices, restrictive thought processes and even ordinary thought itself.”

“No single person can liberate a country. You can only liberate a country if you act as a collective.”

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

“But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.”

“The less we have, the more we give. Seems absurd, but it's the logic of love.”

“The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardner objected that the tree was slow growing and wouldn't reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, "In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!” 

“All achievers had plans that they clearly listed or outlined and run to their fulfillment. If you want to make it as they did, you have to make a plan that defines your purpose; you must write out and clearly define who you are and who you want to be, what you have to do to be that person and how it will be done.”

“The oak sleeps in the acorn. The bird waits in the egg, and in the highest vision of the soul, a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.”

“My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself.”