“People who make great impact are well remembered due to the empty seats that remain after their death. It takes time to fill the empty seats that are left unoccupied by people who walked great in great footprints.”

“I am not what happened to me; I am what I choose to become.”

“Our democracy is threatened whenever we take it for granted.”

“My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.”

“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.” 

“If you want to be the best leader you can possibly be, no matter how much or how little natural leadership talent you possess, you need to become a serving leader.”

“I never will forget this. I went and threw myself across my daughter’s bed, and I cried and I cried and I cried and I cried, because I felt like that I had been so faithful and that there was no financial breakthrough for us. You ever have one of those days where you are tired of hearing everybody else’s testimony? But, I made a decision that day, and I think we all have to come to this point in many different areas of our life. And, as I lay across that bed and cried, when I finally got done crying I said this out loud, it was like my declaration, “God, I am going to tithe and give offerings until the day I die whether I ever see anything from it or not!” And, you know what, from that day forward we began to prosper and increase. And, I believe with all of my heart that was a test for me.”

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance.”

“If a man aspires towards a righteous life, his first act of abstinence is from injury to animals.”

“Get rid of that small-minded thinking and start thinking as God thinks. Think big. Think increase. Think abundance. Think more than enough.”

“One of the ingredients of forming good habits and breaking bad ones is focusing on what you want to do and not on what you want to stop doing.”

“My difficulties lay deeper. It was more than I could believe that Jesus was the only incarnate son of God, and that only he who believed in him would have everlasting life. If God could have sons, all of us were His sons. If Jesus was like God, or God Himself, then all men were like God and could be God Himself. My reason was not ready to believe literally that Jesus by his death and by his blood redeemed the sins of the world. Metaphorically there might be some truth in it. Again, according to Christianity only human beings had souls, and not other living beings, for whom death meant complete extinction; while I held a contrary belief. I could accept Jesus as a martyr, an embodiment of sacrifice, and a divine teacher, but not as the most perfect man ever born. His death on the Cross was a great example to the world, but that there was anything like a mysterious or miraculous virtue in it my heart could not accept. The pious lives of Christians did not give me anything that the lives of men of other faiths had failed to give. I had seen in other lives just the same reformation that I had heard of among Christians. Philosophically there was nothing extraordinary in Christian principles. From the point of view of sacrifice, it seemed to me that the Hindus greatly surpassed the Christians. It was impossible for me to regard Christianity as a perfect religion or the greatest of all religions.”

“Believers who are living in close fellowship with God are not going to think about how terrible they are. They will have righteousness-based thoughts that come through meditating regularly on who they are “in Christ.”

“Faith is neither hope nor trust, but a particular spiritual state. Faith is man’s awareness that his position in the world obliges him to perform certain actions. A person acts according to his faith, not as the catechism says because he believes in things unseen as in things seen, nor because he wishes to achieve things hoped for, but simply because having defined his position in the world it is natural for him to act according to it.”

“To believe that what has not occurred in history will not occur at all, is to argue disbelief in the dignity of man.”