“Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom, Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

“When the examination was over, the doctor looked at his watch, and then Praskovya Fyodorovna informed Ivan Ilyich that it must of course be as he liked, but she had sent today for a celebrated doctor, and that he would examine him, and have a consultation with Mihail Danilovich (that was the name of his regular doctor). 'Don't oppose it now, please. This I'm doing entirely for my own sake,' she said ironically, meaning it to be understood that she was doing it all for his sake, and was only saying this to give him no right to refuse her request. He lay silent, knitting his brows. He felt that he was hemmed in by such a tangle of falsity that it was hard to disentangle anything from it. Everything she did for him was entirely for her own sake, and she told him she was doing for her own sake what she actually was doing for her own sake as something so incredible that he would take it as meaning the opposite.”

“When God wants to make a mushroom, he does it overnight, but when He wants to make a giant oak, He takes a hundred years. Great souls are grown through struggles and storms and seasons of suffering. Be patient with the process.”

“What has chance ever done in the world? Has it built any cities? Has it invented any telephones, and telegraphs? Has it built any steamships, established any universities, any asylums, any hospitals? Was there any chance in Cæsar’s crossing the Rubicon? What had chance to do with Napoleon’s career, with Wellington’s, or Grant’s…? Every battle was won before it was begun. What had luck to do with Thermopylæ, Trafalgar, Gettysburg? Our successes we ascribe to ourselves; our failures to destiny.”

“It is not the magnitude of our actions, but the amount of love that is put into them that matters.”

“To earn more you must learn more.”

“Charles Schwab: Be friends with everybody. When you have friends you will know there is somebody who will stand by you. You know the old saying, that if you have a single enemy you will find him everywhere. It doesn’t pay to make enemies. Lead the life that will make you kind and friendly to everyone about you, and you will be surprised what a happy life you will live.”

“A stone is heavy and the sand is weighty; but a fool's wrath is heavier than them both.”

“Marriage is one sweet way in which one can taste heaven on earth. Similarly, I can also become hell on earth.”

“The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.”

“The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.”

“We live in an upside-down world, in which people hate what they should love and love what they should hate.”

“At moments of departure and a change of life, people capable of reflecting on their actions usually get into a serious state of mind. At these moments they usually take stock of the past and make plans for the future.”

“They forbid the use of the word slavery by conservatives, the mention of Nazism by conservatives, or the mention of homosexuality in anything other than a positive context, to name a few of their rules.”

“know who I am! I’m a new creature in Christ Jesus. I’m a child of God. I’m an heir of God. I’m a joint-heir with Jesus Christ. I’m the righteousness of God. Hallelujah!”