“All that appears and happens about and around us is uncertain, transient.”

“Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past, let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”

“There is no way to your personal joy if you hand over the keys to someone who is not ready to open the door for you. You have the right to choose your friends; do it carefully!”

“The good man is the friend of all living things.”

“The Bible is a guidebook, leading men [and women] to God in a personal faith. Like a map or guidebook, it will show you the way, but you must take it one step at a time.”

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

“You face the biggest challenge of all: to have the courage to seek your big dream regardless of what anyone says. You are the only person alive who can see your big picture and even you can't see it all.”

“When politicians prioritize local rule instead of trying to force the whole country to agree with them, I think the pursuit of happiness will be within the reach of a far greater portion of our populace.”

“Many Christians give in to various temptations through peer pressure and find themselves surrendering to worldly passions, justifying pleasures the world offers.”

“I can’t think of you and myself apart. You and I are the same to me”

“It is a simple tale, but its message is an enduring one: virtue and generosity will be rewarded in ways that one cannot know.”

“Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.”

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

“But you see, a rich country like America can perhaps afford to be stupid.”

“I am by heritage a Jew, by citizenship a Swiss, and by makeup a human being, and only a human being, without any special attachment to any state or national entity whatsoever.”