“One big blow can hit and destroy any strong door in front of you. As for the 1000 feeble blows, they can’t even remove the cobwebs. Courage is the key.”

“The Bible is God’s gift to us. It came from God, and it points us to God.”

“No, that trauma you faced was not easy. And God wept that it hurt you so; But it was allowed to shape your heart So that into his likeness you’d grow.”

“Desconozco todas las claves para el éxito, pero tratar de agradar a todo el mundo es una de las claves para el fracaso. Ser influenciado por la opinión de los demás te garantiza perder los propósitos de Dios para tu vida.”

“He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began.”

“But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.”

“Mass is vital to a bodybuilder’s physique. But it is the shape and the quality of this mass that win contests.”

“I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.”

“La experiencia no garantiza la credibilidad, pero motiva a las personas a dar la oportunidad de probar que se es capaz.” 

“The body, learning a thing is good for it, interprets the flavor as pleasurable—slightly euphoric. And, like life, never to be truly synthesized.”

“May you live boldly and be all God intends you to be, and live in the fullness of the joy and beauty that you were created for.”

“To a child love is spelled T-I-M-E.”

“Disappointment and failure are not signs that God has forsaken you or stopped loving you. The devil wants you to believe God no longer loves you, but it isn’t true. God’s love for us never fails.”

“When leaders learn and live good values, they make themselves more valuable and lift the value of other people. That is the foundation of positive leadership.”

“In another conversation I said, ‘Tell me the truth. When you were leaving prison after twenty-seven years and walking down that road to freedom, didn’t you hate them all over again?’ And he said, ‘Absolutely I did, because they’d imprisoned me for so long. I was abused. I didn’t get to see my children grow up. I lost my marriage and the best years of my life. I was angry. And I was afraid, because I had not been free in so long. But as I got closer to the car that would take me away, I realized that when I went through that gate, if I still hated them, they would still have me. I wanted to be free. And so I let it go.”