“The key to friendship with God, he said, is not changing what you do, but changing your attitude toward what you do.”

“Let your actions be for a purpose and let them be taken with passion. Develop the habit of making the best use of your chances and your desires will come to pass!”

“The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative:”

“Whatever you do well in the darkness tells more about who you are than what you do best in light. Watch out!”

“Courage is not the absence of fear; it is action in the presence of fear. Bold people do what they know they should do—not what they feel like doing.”

“If you wouldn't follow yourself, why should anyone else?”

“Experience gives us confidence, but we never get experience unless we step out and try things we have not tried before.”

“People keep on struggling when it comes to prayer and faith because they don’t actually believe what the Word says.”

“A mistake is simply another way of doing things.”

“Prayer is not an old woman's idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.”

“If my life was a movie, no one would believe it.”

“No one is satisfied with his fortune,and everyone is satisfied with his wit.”

“We did live in dire poverty. And one of the things that I hated was poverty. Some people hate spiders. Some people hate snakes. I hated poverty. I couldn't stand it. My mother couldn't stand the fact that we were doing poorly in school, and she prayed and she asked God to give her wisdom. What could she do to get her young sons to understand the importance of developing their minds so that they control their own lives? God gave her the wisdom. At least in her opinion. My brother and I didn't think it was that wise. Turn off the TV, let us watch only two or three TV programs during the week. And with all that spare time read two books a piece from the Detroit Public Libraries and submit to her written book reports, which she couldn't read but we didn't know that. I just hated this. My friends were out having a good time. Her friends would criticize her. My mother didn't care. But after a while I actually began to enjoy reading those books. Because we were very poor, but between the covers of those books I could go anywhere. I could be anybody. I could do anything. I began to read about people of great accomplishment. And as I read those stories, I began to see a connecting thread. I began to see that the person who has the most to do with you, and what happens to you in life, is you. You make decisions. You decide how much energy you want to put behind that decision. And I came to understand that I had control of my own destiny. And at that point I didn't hate poverty anymore, because I knew it was only temporary. I knew I could change that. It was incredibly liberating for me. Made all the difference.” 

“You cannot score a goal when you are sitting on the bench. To do so, you have to dress up and enter the game.”

“The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.”