“Watch your dreams and watch our friends. Take time and watch your friend again with sharpened eyes. Turn on your dreams again; watch them again; then watch your friends once more and know who to keep away and who to keep nearer!”

“If you don’t cut off negative information it will depress you. Step out of the natural and say, “This may be impossible with men, but I know with God all things are possible.”

“Ask [God] to help you reflect Christ as you grow older, instead of turning sour or grumpy.”

“One major way to avoid shifting blames unto other people is to accept and agree that the efforts that turn the loads of your self- improvement have to turn on your own pivot.”

“Talent is a gift, but character is a choice.”

“In Chapter One, I discussed four of the seven steps to answered prayer. The four steps already covered are as follows: 1.Decide what you want from God and find the scripture or scriptures that definitely promise you these things. 2.Ask God for the things you want and believe that you receive them. 3.Let every thought and desire affirm that you have what you asked for. 4.Guard against every evil thought that comes into your mind to try to make you doubt God’s Word. Step Number Five: Meditate on God’s Promises Step number five to receiving answered prayer is meditate constantly on the promises upon which you based the answer to your prayer. In other words, you must see yourself in possession of what you’ve asked for and make plans accordingly as if it were already a reality.   PROVERBS 4:20-22 20 My son, ATTEND TO MY WORDS; incline thine ear unto my sayings. 21 Let them not depart from thine eyes; keep them in the midst of thine heart. 22 For they are life unto those that find them, and health to all their flesh.   God said, “My son, attend to my words . . .” (Prov. 4:20). God will make His Word good in your life if you’ll act on it.”

“Still, I strongly resisted the idea of offering up my past in a book, a past that left me feeling exposed, even slightly ashamed.”

“I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. --February 22, 1861”

“The only one who can re-create us is the One who created us in the first place. If your watch were out of order, you wouldn’t take it to a blacksmith. If your car needed overhauling, you wouldn’t go to a machine shop. Our spiritual problems can be solved only by the God who created us originally.”

“You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. 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 possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, 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 thing 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.”

“Knowledge is the key that unlocks all the doors. You can be green-skinned with yellow polka dots and come from Mars, but if you have knowledge that people need instead of beating you, they'll beat a path to your door.”

“What makes a man is not the ability to have a child but having the courage to raise one.”

“God knows the mess we’re in when He calls us. His light shines greater through “cracked pots” than it does through those who have it all together.”

“God is fighting your battles. When you’re at rest, God will make your enemies your footstool.”

“THE LAW OF THE CHAIN The Strength of the Team Is Impacted by Its Weakest Link”