“Majority of excuses are deliberate attempts to keep success far away. Eventually, the success goes away because that is the command "excuses" gave out; "pack and go"!”

“In Varenka, she realized that one has but to forget oneself and love others, and one will be calm, happy, and noble.”

“shining example of perseverance is renowned pastor John Wesley. Let’s take a peek into his diary . . .   Sunday, A.M. May 5 Preached in St. Anne’s. Was asked not to come back anymore. Sunday, P.M. May 5 Preached in St. Jude’s. Can’t go back there, either. Sunday, A.M. May 19 Preached in St. Somebody Else’s. Deacons called special meeting and said I couldn’t return. Sunday, P.M. May 19 Preached on street. Kicked off street. Sunday, A.M. May 26 Preached in meadow. Chased out of meadow as bull was turned loose during service. Sunday, A.M. June 2 Preached out at the edge of town. Kicked off the highway. Sunday, P.M. June 2 Afternoon, preached in a pasture. Ten thousand people came out to hear me.

“Get rid of pride; it'll only ride you to the wrong side of life. May God's words guide your faith to abide in true humility. Kick off pride; embrace humility!”

“Of course you cannot know a man completely, his character, his principles, sense of judgement, not till he’s shown his colors, run the people, making laws. Experience, there’s the test.”

“Stoning prophets and erecting churches to their memory afterwards has been the way of the world through the ages. Today we worship Christ, but the Christ in the flesh we crucified.”

“People change when they ... Hurt enough that they have to, Learn enough that they want to, and Receive enough that they are able to.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Birth and death are not two different states, but they are different aspects of the same state.”

“He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future. Things persisted in not being what they seemed.”

“Four Unpardonable Sins of a Communicator”: being unprepared, uncommitted, uninteresting, or uncomfortable.”

“Be a victor, not a victim.”

“We have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?

“I don't believe in a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do. I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.”