“Before you can achieve success in the higher and broader sense you must gain such thorough control over yourself that you will be a person of poise.” 

“A nation which expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, expects that which never was and never will be.”

“We have become so tolerant and accepting of the world’s ways that it is hard for many in the church to notice the sin much less answer how it crept in. The church is to be in the world, but worldliness is not to infiltrate the church.”

“We did live in dire poverty. And one of the things that I hated was poverty. Some people hate spiders. Some people hate snakes. I hated poverty. I couldn't stand it. My mother couldn't stand the fact that we were doing poorly in school, and she prayed and she asked God to give her wisdom. What could she do to get her young sons to understand the importance of developing their minds so that they control their own lives? God gave her the wisdom. At least in her opinion. My brother and I didn't think it was that wise. Turn off the TV, let us watch only two or three TV programs during the week. And with all that spare time read two books a piece from the Detroit Public Libraries and submit to her written book reports, which she couldn't read but we didn't know that. I just hated this. My friends were out having a good time. Her friends would criticize her. My mother didn't care. But after a while I actually began to enjoy reading those books. Because we were very poor, but between the covers of those books I could go anywhere. I could be anybody. I could do anything. I began to read about people of great accomplishment. And as I read those stories, I began to see a connecting thread. I began to see that the person who has the most to do with you, and what happens to you in life, is you. You make decisions. You decide how much energy you want to put behind that decision. And I came to understand that I had control of my own destiny. And at that point I didn't hate poverty anymore, because I knew it was only temporary. I knew I could change that. It was incredibly liberating for me. Made all the difference.” 

“There is nothing, nothing certain but the nothingness of all that is comprehensible to us, and the grandeur of something incomprehensible, but more important!”

“Our words and actions should bear good fruit (see Matthew 7:15–20). If we appear to have good fruit, it is important that we actually have it because people will be watching us to see if we are genuine. God has chosen us to be His ambassadors (see 2 Corinthians 5:20), and we represent Him well when there is good fruit in our lives. It isn’t enough just to have a Jesus sticker on our cars and a cross hanging around our necks displaying our Christianity—we must have the fruit to back it up.” 

“The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.”

“I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, a thousand unremembered moments, produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people.”

“When you stop planning and preparing . . . you stop winning.”

“You can get anything you want in this life if you help enough other people get what they want.” 

“It was as if the main screw in his head, which held his whole life together, had become stripped. The screw would not go in, would not come out, but turned in the same groove without catching hold, and it was impossible to stop turning it.”

“WE NEED TO LET GOD HEAL US, SO HE CAN USE US TO BRING HEALING TO OTHERS.”

“Wenn man zwei Stunden lang mit einem Mädchen zusammensitzt, meint man, es wäre eine Minute. Sitzt man jedoch eine Minute auf einem heißen Ofen, meint man, es wären zwei Stunden. Das ist Relativität.”

“What is important for a leader is that which makes him a leader. It is the needs of his people.”

“Stepan Arkadyich smiled. He knew so well this feeling of Levin's, knew that for him all the girls in the world were divided into two sorts: one sort was all the girls in the world except her, and these girls had all human weaknesses and were very ordinary girls; the other sort was her alone, with no weaknesses and higher than everything human.”