“Showing Respect Is not Slavery...and Must Be Taught”

“Life meanwhile, the actual life of men with their real interests of health and sickness, labour and rest, with their interests of thought, science, poetry, music, love, affection, hatred, passion, went its way, as always, independently, apart from the political amity or enmity of Napoleon Bonaparte, and apart from all possible reforms.”

“Never wait for the alarm clock to wake you up; your passion must wake you up against sluggish lifestyles. Positive passion keeps you hot until the work it finished!”

“Moses spent forty years in the king’s palace thinking that he was somebody; then he lived forty years in the wilderness finding out that without God he was a nobody; finally he spent forty years discovering how a nobody with God can be a somebody.”

“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.”

“Much about success is just the result of simply the ability to follow up, follow through, and finish what we started.”

“If God were to remove all evil from our world (but somehow leave human beings on the planet), it would mean that the essence of 'humanness' would be destroyed. We would become robots. Let me explain what I mean by this. If God eliminated evil by programming us to perform only good acts, we would lose this distinguishing mark - the ability to make choices. We would no longer be free moral agents. We would be reduced to the status of robots. Let's take this a step further. Robots do not love. God created us with the capacity to love. Love is based upon one's right to choose to love. We cannot force others to love us. We can make them serve us or obey us. But true love is founded upon one's freedom to choose to respond.”

“Thinking about My Purpose POINT TO PONDER: Happiness is my choice. I don’t need anyone’s approval to be happy. VERSE TO REMEMBER: “Even if my father and mother abandon me, the Lord will hold me close.” PSALM 27:10 (NLT) QUESTION TO CONSIDER: Whose opinion matters most to me? Whose approval am I living for?”

“We must use time creatively - and forever realize that the time is always hope to do great things.”

“When we approach the Bible as history and biography, we approach the Bible in the wrong spirit. We must read the Bible, not primarily as historians seeking information, but as men and women seeking God.”

“If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.”

“Sooner or later, we are going to face death; should we be making preparations while we are living?”

“I have read more about Oprah Winfrey’s ass than I have about the rise of China as an economic superpower. I fear this is no exaggeration. Perhaps China is rising as an economic superpower because its women aren’t spending all their time reading about Oprah Winfrey’s ass.”

“Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.”

“excuses are nothing more than a way to deceive ourselves and justify doing nothing. You will come alive like never before if you will aggressively reach out to others. Let us not forget the words of Jesus: “I give you a new commandment: that you should love one another. Just as I have loved you, so you too should love one another” (John 13:34). Without a doubt, this is our purpose and the will of God for our lives.”