“Let's stop discussing about who a wise person is and start learning to become wise persons. Begin acquiring knowledge at the very moment you discover that there is something called "knowledge"!”

“Faith in Christ is voluntary. A person cannot be coerced, bribed, or tricked into trusting Jesus. God will not force His way into your life. The Holy Spirit will do everything possible to disturb you, draw you, love you—but finally it is your personal decision.”

“And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.”

“The most thought to keep in mind is that "players" gain money at the end of each game while "spectators" lose it for a ticket in order to see the gainful players display their skills. Don't you want to keep watching your dreams or you want to get on the run with them?”

“Jesus Christ was the Master Realist when He urged men to prepare for death, which was certain to come. Do not worry, said the Lord Jesus, about the death of the body, but rather concern yourself with the eternal death of the soul.”

“The Pareto Principle 20 percent of your priorities will give you 80 percent of your production IF you spend your time, energy, money, and personnel on the top 20 percent of your priorities.”

“We must become holy not because we want to feel holy, but because Christ must be able to live His life fully in us.”

“Mind you, the effectiveness of one hunter’s gun does not determine the number of bush meats the other hunter will kill. You got to be yourself. Be you.”

“We don’t need to be crippled any longer by the disease of sin—because God has provided the cure.”

“After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.” 

“Sometimes it’s best to start moving in the direction you think God may want you to go, and then trust Him to lead you—closing doors He doesn’t want you to go through and opening up others.”

“But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.”

“If you know Christ, you don’t need to beg for the Holy Spirit to come into your life; He is already there—whether you “feel” His presence or not. Don’t confuse the Holy Spirit with an emotional feeling or a particular type of spiritual experience.”

“There lay between them, separating them, that same terrible line of the unknown and of fear, like the line separating the living from the dead.”

“In God’s eyes, the greatest heroes of the faith are not those who achieve prosperity, success, and power in this life, but those who treat this life as a temporary assignment and serve faithfully, expecting their promised reward in eternity.”