“Practice makes perfect. After a long time of practicing, our work will become natural, skillfull, swift, and steady.”

“Your choices become your directions the moment you start to implement them. When you make choices and you don’t implement them, your choices may be the best ever, but the most useless.”

“There is no god higher than truth.”

“Las personas se están preparando para el éxito cuando deberían estarse preparando para el fracaso. Fracasar es mucho más común que triunfar; la pobreza está más generalizada que la riqueza; y la desilusión es más normal que los logros.”

“Don't allow anybody to make you feel that you're nobody.”

“Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?”

“God says in Zechariah 4:6, “Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit” (NKJV).”

“In the developed countries there is a poverty of intimacy, a poverty of spirit, of loneliness, of lack of love. There is no greater sickness in the world today than that one.”

“The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under.”

“Leaders act with visions; they don't react with emotions. Maturity is when you don't allow your bad feelings to direct your good dealings.”

“They, they, they. That was the problem with people like Joyce. They talked about the richness of their multicultural heritage and it sounded real good, until you noticed that they avoided black people. It wasn't a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around. Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial, willing to adopt the occasional exotic into its ranks. Only white culture had individuals. And we, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don't want to? We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America's happy, faceless marketplace; and we're never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we're bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloreds have to put up with every single day of their lives-- although that's what we tell ourselves-- but because we're wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger. Don't know who I am? I'm an individual!”

“He's not safe, but he's good (referring to Aslan, the Lion, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)”

“You can't be paralyzed by fear of failure or you will never push yourself.”

“It's not a question we ask ourselves enough, I think; as a country, we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit. We wouldn't tolerate schools that don't teach, that are chronically underfunded and understaffed and underinspired, if we thought that the children in them were like our children. I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those who are struggling. If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves.”

“Leaders do not chase comfort; they pursue vision even if it comes with risks. Don’t give up too early because you see not early rewards.”