“Step number seven to receiving answered prayer is make every prayer relative to what you’ve asked a statement of faith instead of unbelief. You can think and say words of faith just as easily as you can think and say words of doubt and unbelief. It is thinking faith thoughts and speaking faith words that leads the heart out of defeat and into victory.”

“When everything is laid out neatly and in sequence, you will feel much more like getting on with the job.”

“When you truly love someone, you want to please and honor them by the way you act. How you treat someone shows whether or not you really care about them.”

“You cannot have a negative mouth and a positive life.” 

“Life is full of many unpredictable changes... Let go of chaos yesterday; cheerfully live for today, and look forward to tomorrow with greater possibilities... It's our imperfections that make us perfect in our own unique ways”

“You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want”

“Temptation is not a sin. It is the yielding that is sin. All temptation is from the devil.”

“You can be called to do something that feels difficult to your flesh, but if you can get beyond your initial doubts and find that you have peace once you are doing it, then you will know that God is confirming your natural talents.”

“Rather than trying to control or confiscate guns, it might be smarter to offer free, public gun-safety courses. In countries like Switzerland, every man within a certain age range is required to possess a gun and to know how to use it, and Switzerland has one of the lowest gun homicide rates in the world.”

“GROWING UP changes one’s definition of what is fun — maturation does that, thankfully — so I hate to admit now that as a boy I thoroughly enjoyed throwing rocks at cars. It was a thrill to wait in hiding, ambush the car driving by, and then make our escape. Occasionally, a driver would stop their vehicle and get out to yell at us. But if we were really fortunate, they would chase us. We would run just far enough ahead to encourage them, but when they got close, we would turn on the afterburners of youth, leaving them far behind while we laughed hysterically. Once in a while, the police would come by — usually in unmarked cars — and the chase would be much more dramatic until we reached the ten-foot-tall fences at the end of the neighborhood field. To the police, it must have appeared as if they had us trapped. They had no idea, however, how practiced we were at vaulting those fences. We treated it like an Olympic event, running at full speed toward the fence and then leaping high into the air, grabbing the chain links, and allowing the momentum of our feet to swing us over the top and down on the other side. We would laugh at the police as we ran off, knowing there was no way they would follow us. Today I have great admiration for the police, who risk their lives on a daily basis to protect our lives, freedom, and property.”

“creativity is just learning to do something with a different perspective.”

Many families remain for years in the same place, though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply because there is neither complete division nor agreement between them.”

“To us, it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg was wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have the with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.”

“For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”

“As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.”