“If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.”

“I have the consolation of having added nothing to my private fortune during my public service, and of retiring with hands clean as they are empty.”

“The environment is everything that isn't me.”

“For example, when the preacher in a service tells the audience to open to a certain passage of Scripture, we love to open our Bible and be proud of how we have it marked up in all different colors. We may have Scriptures underlined, with handwritten notes beside them. We secretly hope the people around us will notice and think well of us because we appear to have studied quite a lot. We want people to think we are spiritual, but we must realize that God is not impressed with how many Scriptures we have underlined.

“The Bible lists in Hebrews 11 the heroes of the faith . . .who were tortured, imprisoned, stoned, torn apart, and killed by the sword. They didn’t wear designer jeans but went about in animal skins, destitute and tormented.”

“One of the most important questions a woman can ask herself: What do I really want-and what is my spirit telling me is the best way to proceed?”

“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.”

“The capacity to surmount failure without being discouraged is the chief asset of every person who attains outstanding success in any calling.”

“Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of--something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possesed your soul have been but hints of it--tantalizing glimspes, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the things we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”

“El lamento nos deja sin energía. No podemos construir sobre el lamento. El temor al futuro nos distrae y nos llena de aprensión.”

“As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison.”

“If friendship is your weakest point, then you are the strongest person in the world.”

“Doing for people what they can, and ought to do for themselves, is a dangerous experiment,” the great labor leader Samuel Gompers said. “In the last analysis, the welfare of the workers depends on their own initiative.” The classic “liberal” believed individuals should be masters of their own destiny and the least government is the best government; these are precepts of freedom and self-reliance that are at the root of the American way and the American spirit.” 

“Prayer is crucial in evangelism: Only God can change the heart of someone who is in rebellion against Him. No matter how logical our arguments or how fervent our appeals, our words will accomplish nothing unless God’s Spirit prepares the way.”

“I believe that every human mind feels pleasure in doing good to another.”