“Without a purpose, life is motion without meaning, activity without direction, and events without reason. Without a purpose, life is trivial, petty, and pointless.”

“Truth is a tyrant-the only tyrant to whom we can give our allegiance. The service of truth is a matter of heroism.”

“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!”

“Everyone wants to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.”

“I stopped three feet from gold, but I will never stop because men say ‘no’ when I ask them to buy insurance.”

“Regimes planted by bayonets do not take root... Our military strength is a prerequisite to peace, but let it be clear we maintain this strength in the hope it will never be used, for the ultimate determinant in the struggle that's now going on in the world will not be bombs and rockets but a test of wills and ideas, a trial of spiritual resolve, the values we hold, the beliefs we cherish, the ideals to which we are dedicated.”

“My greatest fear is not living before I die, to play everything so safe that even though I had no risk I also enjoyed no reward.”

“Give a smile always, not once a while. Life's great when you wake up and ignore the scaring nightmares you had. Forget the bitter bile; life's sweet beyond River Nile. File your teeth out and smile!”

“He recalled, too, his mistake in having stopped only three feet from gold, "but," he said, "that experience was a blessing in disguise. It taught me to keep on keeping on, no matter how hard the going may be, a lesson I needed to learn before I could succeed in anything.”

“In prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”

“The strongest people are people who faced the toughest situations in life. People who are defeated by the toughest battles are stronger than those who have won by using the escape route!”

“You must have a long-range vision to keep you from being frustrated by short-range failures.”

“What makes us Christians shrug our shoulders when we ought to be flexing our muscles? What makes us apathetic in a day when there are loads to lift, a world to be won, and captives to be set free? Why are so many bored, when the times demand action? Christ told us that in the last days there would be an insipid attitude toward life.”

“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.”

“Worry is the intrest paid by those who borrow trouble.