“Common people with uncommon goals who make an uncommon commitment can help an uncommon number of people who can also lead other common people to do uncommon things. Develop your potential to the full. And as you do, lead others in developing theirs. Be all you can be. Then help someone else be all they can be.”

“One of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat

“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.”

“THE HEART OF WORSHIP IS SURRENDER.”

“Boredom: the desire for desires.”

“There are no big men and big women. There are small people with big dreams and extra larger passion!”

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it enough.”

“Even in Europe a change has sensibly taken place in the mind of man. Science has liberated the ideas of those who read and reflect, and the American example has kindled feelings of right in the people.”

“Love is the strongest force the world possesses and yet it is the humblest imaginable.”

“[The fairy tale] stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: The reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”

“There isn’t anyone you couldn’t learn to love once you’ve heard their story.” —Fred Rogers”

“We make Him too small in our eyes and expect much less than He desires to give.”

“What you sow you reap. What you give”

“We don’t have to be on the battlefields of the world to experience strife and conflict. We need only to open our eyes each morning and read the headlines, we need only to turn a keen ear when our phones ring with bad news, we need only to open our hearts to those next door—and maybe even in our own homes—to notice those with grieving hearts.”

“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.”