“You are today where your decisions have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your decisions will take you. If you really want to know who you are now, take a tour about the decisions you made some years back.”

“The same talk, the same thoughts, and always about the same things! And they are all satisfied and confident that it should be so, and will go on living like that till they die.”

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

“If you don’t believe in yourself, how can you ask others to do so?”

“Just to be tender, just to be true,         Just to be glad the whole day through,         Just to be merciful, just to be mild,         Just to be trustful as a child,         Just to be gentle and kind and sweet,         Just to be helpful with willing feet,         Just to be cheery when things go wrong,         Just to drive sadness away with song,         Whether the hour is dark or bright,         Just to be loyal to God and right         Just to believe that God knows best,         Just in His promise ever to rest,         Just to let love be our daily key,         That is God’s will for you and me. Our Father and our God, You have shown me such great kindness and gentle mercy. Teach me to be gentle and kind too. Help me reach out to the lost in compassion and love to bring them gently to You through the person of Jesus Christ, through whom I pray.”

“Why shouldn’t we have laws forbidding pornography and obscenity? Many heroic leaders have tried, but they have stumbled over even the definition of the word “obscenity.” If we cannot agree on the length of a foot, it is because we have lost our yardstick.”

“I believe Success is achieved by ordinary people with Extraordinary Determination.” 

“Older men start wars, but younger men fight them. ”

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

“physical or anything else, it’ll spread over into the rest of your life.”

“Once God leads you to make a decision, don’t draw back. Instead, trust His leading, and believe He goes before you—because He does.”

“Be careful you don’t give up on what is yet to give you victory. Many people quit when they were yet to win. Successful people never quit and I believe no quitter had ever been successful too.”

“Live free of regret and filled with as much joy, fun, and laughter as you can stand. You have a choice. Enjoy yourself.”

“Sex-centered magazines litter our newsstands . . . each edition trying to escape new laws from the bottom of the sewers. We put lids on sewer holes. Ought we not to do something about the pornography which is spewing out a polluted river of filth which can destroy us faster than any chemical pollution we seem so worried about?7”

“Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.”