“Old age is Satan’s last chance to blow us off course.”

“One must be cunning and wicked in this world.”

“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.”

“If we are to put an end to division, people from all political persuasions will have to stop fighting one another and seek true unity, not just a consensus that benefits one party.”

“The angel of the LORD encamps all around those who fear Him, and delivers them. PSALM 34:7”

“My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

“It is strange that men will prepare for everything except death. We prepare for education. We prepare for business. We prepare for our careers. We prepare for marriage. We prepare for old age. We prepare for everything except the moment we are to die.”

“Any ideas, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought”

“Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.”

“It is an eternal truth that men receive more pay for their ABILITY TO GET OTHERS TO PERFORM, than they could possibly earn by their own efforts.”

“Whatever your mind can conceive and can believe, it can achieve”

“Cuando vivimos a la luz de la eternidad, nuestro enfoque cambia. En lugar de plantearnos: «¿Cuánto placer me proporciona la vida?», llegamos a pensar: «¿Cuánto placer le proporciono a Dios con mi vida?».”

“Don’t try to prove to everybody that the reason why you can’t is that nobody could. It’s no excuse. You can break the tradition by being the first person to make it happen!”

“In your temporary failure there is no evidence that you may not yet be a better scholar, and a more successful man in the great struggle of life, than many others, who have entered college more easily.”

“Oh, the worst of all tragedies is not to die young, but to live until I am seventy-five and yet not ever truly to have lived.”