“The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.”

“you had nothing to say about it and yet made the nothing up into words.”

“I ask one thing: I ask the right to hope and suffer as I do now."

both success and failure are largely the results of habit!” 

“Secrecy spawns isolation, not success.”

“The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.”

“Everything was made bright by her. She was the smile that shed light all around her.”

“I believe integrity can be restored to a society one person at a time. The choice belongs to each of us.”

“FAITH and FEAR make poor bedfellows. Where one is found, the other cannot exist.”

“You can lose everything in life,but not dreams.”

“God Sees the Good in You”

“GROWING UP changes one’s definition of what is fun — maturation does that, thankfully — so I hate to admit now that as a boy I thoroughly enjoyed throwing rocks at cars. It was a thrill to wait in hiding, ambush the car driving by, and then make our escape. Occasionally, a driver would stop their vehicle and get out to yell at us. But if we were really fortunate, they would chase us. We would run just far enough ahead to encourage them, but when they got close, we would turn on the afterburners of youth, leaving them far behind while we laughed hysterically. Once in a while, the police would come by — usually in unmarked cars — and the chase would be much more dramatic until we reached the ten-foot-tall fences at the end of the neighborhood field. To the police, it must have appeared as if they had us trapped. They had no idea, however, how practiced we were at vaulting those fences. We treated it like an Olympic event, running at full speed toward the fence and then leaping high into the air, grabbing the chain links, and allowing the momentum of our feet to swing us over the top and down on the other side. We would laugh at the police as we ran off, knowing there was no way they would follow us. Today I have great admiration for the police, who risk their lives on a daily basis to protect our lives, freedom, and property.”

“Calming down is a decision. It has nothing to do with feelings. It is an act of obedience, and we do it to honor God because He lives in our house, and He’s saying: “I want it—I want some peace in this house. I want it quiet in here. I want you to be full of peace.”

“I trust Jesus with all my tomorrows, knowing that He will solve the mystery of life beyond the grave.”

“When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.”