“All too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows”

“Plan and plant your gifts. Pray and play your role. The harvest is assured when God manifests his anointing power in your passionate actions.”

“You'll always get out of life what you put in-and you control what you put in.”

“Enough or not...it will have to do”

“To those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too.”

“God does not always call us to go back physically to a place we have been. But if for example we have a difficult time submitting to a boss with a certain personality God may call us to continue working with someone who has the same personality until we master the situation in a godly way. God does not want us to be on the run He wants us to confront our fears and frustrations in order to find peace in Him.”

“Why does an apple fall when it is ripe? Is it brought down by the force of gravity? Is it because its stalk withers? Because it is dried by the sun, because it grows too heavy, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it? None of these is the cause.... Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own freewill is in the historical sense not free at all but is bound up with the whole course of history and preordained from all eternity.”

“Philosophers play with the word, like a child with a doll. It does not mean that everything in life is relative.”

“Happiness is often elusive and fleeting. There are three elements that, when combined, always result in happiness. Like a three-legged stool, they work in tandem. Any two of the three”

“Friend, I am not suggesting at all. You see, I know now. Let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause. When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment's real resistance to the loss of our faith?”

“Just when the question of how to live had become clearer to him, a new insoluble problem presented itself - Death.”

“Be a loner. That gives you time to wonder, to search for the truth. Have holy curiosity. Make your life worth living.” 

“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 can’t gather much if you won’t go on risk expedition. Leaders never fear the thorns; they’ll still go in for the beautiful roses no matter the number of pricks they’ll get.”

“History is made by men and women of vision and courage. Tonight freedom is on the march.”