“With Malice Towards None”

“So many people ruin relationships and they ruin their ministry and show that they are not yet qualified for the leadership they want to be in when they dofoolish things. One of the most foolish things you can do is think you are anointed to tell everybody else what they are supposed to do.

“The simplest and shortest ethical precept is to be served as little as possible . . . and to serve others as much as possible.”

“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.”

“I have from my experience come to the conclusion that Gita has been composed to teach this one truth which I have explained. We can follow truth only in the measure that we shed our attachment to the ego.”

“I hope the day will never come when the church abandons the “class meeting” and the prayer service . . .The old-fashioned “testimony” meeting should be revived, for through this medium we can share with others our faith and triumphs as well as our needs and mistakes.”

“What makes journalist so fascinating, and biography so interesting [is] the struggle to answer that single question: 'What's he like?”

“It was ANC policy to try to educate all people, even our enemies: we believed that all men, even prison service warders, were capable of change, and we did our utmost to try to sway them.”

“Never entertain anger. Great people do not become angry over unnecessary issues.”

“Be worried if you always flock in the company of people who peel off other people's skins with their teeth in their absence. A time will come when they'll try to pick a bite on you too!”

“There are only two ways to live your life: as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle.”

“I had learned, from years of experience with men, that when a man really desires a thing so deeply that he is willing to stake his entire future on a single turn of the wheel in order to get it, he is sure to win.”

“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. Be water, my friend.”

“I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.”

“The Lord God is my Strength, my personal bravery, and my invincible army; He makes my feet like hinds’ feet and will make me to walk [not to stand still in terror, but to walk] and make [spiritual] progress upon my high places [of trouble, suffering, or responsibility]! HABAKKUK 3:19”