“We are living in a topsy-turvy world, where all is confusion. But you may be sure that it is confusion with a plan—Satan’s plan!”

“Wonderful is the effect of impudent and persevering lying.”

“If I were not a Jew I would be a Quaker.”

“Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.”

“I trust that everything happens for a reason, even if we are not wise enough to see it.”

“What positive changes in your life could happen if you relied on God’s unlimited power instead of your limited willpower.”

“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.”

“Be a hard worker. Work and happiness are like mother and daughter. Work brings forth happiness. Hard work brings great happiness. Enjoy life.”

“A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.”

“Walk in faith. Do not let your doubts take the lead ahead of you; they will show you the wrong path. Being a pessimist is a failure plan uncompleted.”

“You are right in speaking of the moral foundations of science, but you cannot turn around and speak of the scientific foundations of morality.”

“It is a tragic fact that the vast majority of Christians today are living a sub-normal Christian life.”

“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is like an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”

“The belief that God will do everything for man is as untenable as the belief that man can do everything for himself. It, too, is based on a lack of faith. We must learn that to expect God to do everything while we do nothing is not faith but superstition.”

“Put Jesus Christ in the driver’s seat of your life and take your hands off the steering wheel.”