“When you live in the garden of hope, something is always blooming!”

“The failure of a person is wrapped in his ignorance about his strengths.”

“Nobody finishes well by accident.”

“Familiarity breeds complacency.”

“Don't live by your thoughts only; live by your words also. Whatever plans you think about, affirm it in your mouth first, declare it and you will succeed in working it out! Words can be powerful!”

“Our minds must be set always to seek the will of the Lord. Following the progressive discipline revealed through the Bible will result in a walk of obedience to God.”

“Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.”

“You can’t gather much if you won’t go on risk expedition. Leaders never fear the thorns; they’ll still go in for the beautiful roses no matter the number of pricks they’ll get.”

“In many homes and among so-called educated people—it has become fashionable to joke about the Bible and to regard it more as a dust-catcher than as the living Word of God.”

“The human conscience is reliable only when it is guided by the Holy Spirit.”

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”

“If you want to be the best leader you can possibly be, no matter how much or how little natural leadership talent you possess, you need to become a serving leader.”

“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.”

“May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.”

“Don't be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you've been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I haven't seen it myself. I couldn't prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority -because the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact, on authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.”