“When someone is rude, keep a smile on your face. When you stay on the high road and keep your joy, you take away their power."

“We want not so much a Father but a grandfather in heaven, a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?”

“I got to believe that the people who can really be trusted are those who have kept their promises, not under the influence of pleasing people, but under the influence of doing what they have devoted their lives to be doing!”

“I have a dream today” 

“Whose life did you touch? Who did you love, and who loved you back?”

“Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.”

“You don't have to be great to start, you have to start to be great.”

“An evangelist is like a newscaster on television or a journalist writing for a newspaper . . . except that the evangelist’s mission is to tell the Good News that never changes.”

“I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D'Alembert, D’Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.

“When God forgives, there is an immediate and complete change in relationship. Instead of hostility, there is love and acceptance. Instead of enmity, there is friendship.”

“How weak and fruitless must be any word of mine.”

“It’s sad to say, but as much as I cared for the Old Man, and worried about him, I was glad not to have to live with him. I just left him to himself and never looked back.”

“My difficulties lay deeper. It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate son of God, and that only he who believed in him would have everlasting life. If God could have sons, all of us were His sons. If Jesus was like God, or God Himself, then all men were like God and could be God Himself. My reason was not ready to believe literally that Jesus by his death and by his blood redeemed the sins of the world. Metaphorically there might be some truth in it. Again, according to Christianity only human beings had souls, and not other living beings, for whom death meant complete extinction; while I held a contrary belief. I could accept Jesus as a martyr, an embodiment of sacrifice, and a divine teacher, but not as the most perfect man ever born. His death on the Cross was a great example to the world, but that there was anything like a mysterious or miraculous virtue in it my heart could not accept. The pious lives of Christians did not give me anything that the lives of men of other faiths had failed to give. I had seen in other lives just the same reformation that I had heard of among Christians. Philosophically there was nothing extraordinary in Christian principles. From the point of view of sacrifice, it seemed to me that the Hindus greatly surpassed the Christians. It was impossible for me to regard Christianity as a perfect religion or the greatest of all religions.”

“Satan exalted himself above God and endeavored to get man to doubt the reliability of God’s Word.”

“Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.”