“You can either be pitiful, or you can be powerful, but you can't be both.”

“Real love has little to do with gooey emotions and goose bumps; and it has everything to do with the choices we make about the way we treat people.”

Why am I going?" he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. "You know that I am going in order to be where you are," said he. "I cannot do otherwise."

“A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous.”

“Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

“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.”

“Longing for the ideal while criticizing the real is evidence of immaturity. On the other hand, settling for the real without striving for the ideal is complacency. Maturity is living with the tension.”

“Do not [earnestly] remember the former things; neither consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs forth; do you not perceive and know it and will you not give heed to it? I will even make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. Isaiah 43:18,19”

“You cannot enjoy others until you  enjoy yourself because you cannot give to others what you do not have.”

“Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.” 

“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.”

“Authenticity is the exact opposite of what you find in some churches.”

“Assim, antes de podermos acumular riquezas em grande abundância, nós devemos magnetizar as nossas mentes com o intenso DESEJO de riqueza, que devemos nos tornar conscientes do dinheiro até que o DESEJO de dinheiro nos leve a criar planos definidos para adquiri-lo.”

“Our memories are not totally fact or completely fiction. They are a conglomeration of the thoughts that we put together to explain to ourselves who we are. Just like a beautiful flower garden will look totally different in daylight as opposed to dark, the memories of our past are held hostage by our perspective.”

“It's like scarlet fever: one has to get it over." "Then one should invent a way of inoculating love, like vaccination.”