“Maybe you once were excited about that person God supernaturally brought into your life as a marriage partner, but now all the excitement has worn off. Don’t’ allow that sense of a miracle to slip away. Don’t get so familiar with each other that you take one another for granted.”

“Make sure that your heartfelt thanksgiving is more consistent than your nagging needs and your passionate apology fervent than your unhealthy justifications. Be clean and hopeful.”

“Drinking and other forms of body-wrecking pleasures are signs of weakness rather than manliness. It takes a better man to live a clean life—free from the stimulants, depressants, and drugs—than to be artificially [stimulated].”

“Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of--something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possesed your soul have been but hints of it--tantalizing glimspes, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the things we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”

“The most powerful single force in the world today is neither Communism nor Capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile -- it is man's eternal desire to be free and independent.” 

“You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.”

“When we take steps of faith to make progress in life, there is no guarantee that we will not experience opposition. But we do have God’s guarantee that He will always be with us, and that is truly all we need.”

“She was utterly unlike what she had been when he first saw her. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. [...] He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it.”

“It should be remembered also that the outlook from the bottom is not so very bright or encouraging. It has a tendency to kill off ambition. We call it “getting into a rut,” which means that we accept our fate because we form the HABIT of daily routine, a habit that finally becomes so strong we cease to try to throw it off.”

“Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.”

“Las personas son más importantes que el dinero.”

“Satan rejoices when old habits overwhelm [us] and we cave in to the pressure of the crowd . . .perhaps temptation lures [us] into sin . . .a backsliding Christian compromises their faith and causes unbelievers to mock the Gospel.”

“The fact is, it is selfish for a church to not want to grow. A church that says, “We’ve got enough people, we’ve got a nice fellowship. Our church is just the right size. We just need to focus on the members we already have.” That church is, in reality, actually saying, “The rest of the world can go to hell. We don’t care.”

“The very ones whose social pressure cause you to compromise will despise you for it. They probably respect your convictions, and many of them wish they had the moral stamina to stand alone. May the Lord give you added courage to be a witness for Him, even in a hard place.”

“She was as easy to recognize in that crowd as a rose among nettles.”