“To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.”

“Andrew Carnegie said, “As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.” Great”

“People believe marriage will make us better.”

“APRIL 16 Confidence in Christ Do not, therefore, fling away your fearless confidence, for it carries a great and glorious compensation of reward. For you have need of steadfast patience and endurance, so that you may perform and fully accomplish the will of God, and thus receive and carry away [and enjoy to the full] what is promised. HEBREWS 10:35-36 What is confidence? It has been defined as the quality of assurance that leads one to undertake something; the belief that one is able and acceptable; the certainty that causes one to be bold, open, and plain. The devil begins his assault on personal confidence wherever he can find an opening, especially during the vulnerable years of childhood. His goal is to undermine the person because an individual without confidence will never fulfill the plan of God for his life. Christ is in you, ready to help with everything you do for Him. Jesus can restore your confidence and give you the strength, power, and boldness to do what you could never do on your own. Be confident—it is part of your spiritual inheritance!”

“Every destructive emotion bears its own harvest, but anger’s fruit is the most bitter of all.”

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

“Where there is possessiveness, there is violence.”

“Leadership is about inspiration with character, not manipulation with position!”

“Without faith it is impossible to please God.”

“If you do not achieve your God-given goals, it does not mean God has not given the power. It rather means you have taken His power for granted!”

“There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. […] There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves.[…]The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility.”

“Pay bad people with your goodness; fight their hatred with your kindness. Even if you do not achieve victory over other people, you will conquer yourself. —HENRI AMIEL”

“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!”

“Eventually my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I'd begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my mother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into can't: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized.”

“Jessica stopped beside him: ‘What delicious abandon in the sleep of a child.’ He spoke mechanically: ‘If only adults could relax like that.’  ‘Yes.’ ‘When do we lose it?’ He murmured… ‘We do indeed lose something,’ she said.”