“There are three barriers that block our total surrender to God: fear, pride, and confusion. We don’t realize how much God loves us, we want to control our own lives, and we misunderstand the meaning of surrender.”

“I am convinced our own happiness requires that we should continue to mix with the world, and to keep pace with it as it goes. "

“It is amazing the quality of human beings that are in this world if we can just get past people not dressing the way we want them to dress.”

“Superiority complex does not mean "pride" although it appears to be so in the eyes of those who want to see it so. When you feel a higher esteem over the obstacles you desire to surmount, you highly overcome them and can still count a reserved energy to spare!”

“Success is not reserved for a selected group of people who have silver spoons in their mouths. Those who have golden spoons in their hands can equally be satisfied by guiding their faiths to feed their dreams”

“God will supply our needs “according to His riches.”

“He went down trying not to look long at her, as though she were the sun, but he saw her, as one sees the sun, without looking.”

“Jessica, hearing the voices, felt the depth of the experience, realized what terrible inhibitions there must be against shedding tears. She focused on the words: “He gives moisture to the dead.” It was a gift to the shadow world—tears. They would be sacred beyond a doubt.”

“When Jesus hung on the cross, a great unseen cosmic battle raged in the heavens—and in the end, Christ triumphed over all the forces of evil and death and hell.”

“We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world....No doubt pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. it removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of the rebel soul.”

“It is a comfort to hear the words of God in times of stress.”

“But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.”

“Remember, without a goal, your stamina is useless no matter how you get trained. You may defend your integrity and attack your obstacles, but when you have no target in focus, you will score many zero number of goals...”

“People who score zero are not only those who do not participate in the game, but also those who play very well but have no goal in focus!”

“The test of a man isn’t what you think he’ll do. It’s what he actually does.”