“I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.”

“It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.”

“Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.”

“Until we accept and approve of ourselves, no amount of approval from others or position in life will keep us permanently secure. The outside approval we seek becomes an addiction. We work to get approval and it feels good for a short while; then we find that we need more and more. True freedom never comes until we fully realize that we don’t need to struggle to get from others what God freely gives us: love, acceptance, approval, security, worth, and value.”

“Look to the stars and from them learn.”

“The worst ever offence you can commit against your time is to think that “time spent making plans is time being wasted!” Leaders don’t think that way!”

“I’m the well-trained fruit tree, he thought. Full of well-trained feelings and abilities and all of them grafted onto me—all bearing for someone else to pick.”

“If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals.”

“Exercise, lose weight, test your blood sugar, or whatever. Do it without motivation and then guess what. After you start doing the thing, that’s when the motivation comes and makes it easy for you to keep on doing”

“The way you see your life shapes your life.”

“He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.”

“Each path to knowledge involves different rules and these rules are not interchangeable.”

“No man has a chance to enjoy permanent success until he begins to look in a mirror for the real cause of all his mistakes

“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can't. If a thing is free to be good it's 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've got to be free. Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently, He thought it worth the risk. (...) If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will -that is, for making a real world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings- then we may take it it is worth paying.”

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow- witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.”