“Las riquezas no responden a los deseos. Responden sólo a planes definidos, respaldados por deseos concretos, a través de la perseverancia constante.”

“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.”

“For the first time in his life he knew the bitterest sort of misfortune, misfortune beyond remedy, misfortune his own fault.”

“JANUARY 22 Let God Be God For who has known or understood the mind (the counsels and purposes) of the Lord so as to guide and instruct Him and give Him knowledge? 1 CORINTHIANS 2:16 It is not your job to give God guidance, counsel, or direction. It is your job to listen to God and let Him tell you what is going on and what you are to do about it—leaving the rest to Him to work out according to His knowledge and will, not yours. God is God—and you are not. You need to recognize that truth and simply trust yourself to Him, because He is greater than you are in every way. You are created in His image, but He is still above and beyond you. His thoughts and ways are higher than yours. So listen to God tonight, be obedient to Him, and He will teach you His ways. Cast off your care, releasing the weight of all your burdens and sleep peacefully.” 

“In taking our human nature upon Himself, [Jesus] showed us what we might become, what God intended us to be.”

“One of the reasons people don’t achieve their dreams is that they desire to change their results without changing their thinking.”

“Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world that a Freeman, contending for liberty on his own ground, is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth.”

“To all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.”

“To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burdens that only we were strong enough to bear. Burdens”

“Virtues are common, but the virtuous are very few. This is because ordinarily, people know but do not apply what they know. To break the culture, look for more information; learn more and apply more. This is wisdom.”

“Stop trying, & start trusting.”

“You discover your identity and purpose through a relationship with Jesus Christ.”

“And, you know, what we need to do—[applause]what we need to do in this PC world is forget about unanimity of speech and unanimity of thought, and we need to concentrate on being respectful to those people with whom we disagree.”

“Grief comes with many losses. Whatever its cause, grief will come to all of us.”

“How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints.”