“Reward only finished work: It’s good to praise effort, but you should never reward it.

“Unfortunately, there seems to be far more opportunity out there than ability.... We should remember that good fortune often happens when opportunity meets with preparation.” 

“You will regret many things in life, but you will never regret being too kind or too fair.”

“I would never exchange my life with anybody else's,”

“We did live in dire poverty. And one of the things that I hated was poverty. Some people hate spiders. Some people hate snakes. I hated poverty. I couldn't stand it. My mother couldn't stand the fact that we were doing poorly in school, and she prayed and she asked God to give her wisdom. What could she do to get her young sons to understand the importance of developing their minds so that they control their own lives? God gave her the wisdom. At least in her opinion. My brother and I didn't think it was that wise. Turn off the TV, let us watch only two or three TV programs during the week. And with all that spare time read two books a piece from the Detroit Public Libraries and submit to her written book reports, which she couldn't read but we didn't know that. I just hated this. My friends were out having a good time. Her friends would criticize her. My mother didn't care. But after a while I actually began to enjoy reading those books. Because we were very poor, but between the covers of those books I could go anywhere. I could be anybody. I could do anything. I began to read about people of great accomplishment. And as I read those stories, I began to see a connecting thread. I began to see that the person who has the most to do with you, and what happens to you in life, is you. You make decisions. You decide how much energy you want to put behind that decision. And I came to understand that I had control of my own destiny. And at that point I didn't hate poverty anymore, because I knew it was only temporary. I knew I could change that. It was incredibly liberating for me. Made all the difference.” 

“In a gentle way you can shake the world.”

“I don’t believe that young people today can live clean, pure lives without the help of God. The peer pressure is too great and the temptations they see in the movies and on television, and what they hear in their music is too much. Only Christ can give them the power to say no.”

“Don’t lose yourself in the process of caring for others. Don’t overdo it as if you don’t need any care to give to yourself. It’s true, you are special too!”

“Within the covers of the Bible are the answers for all the problems men face.”

“What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us?”

“they’d chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation.”

“I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.”

“Decide upon your major definite purpose in life and then organize all your activities around it.”

“There is always the exceptional child, but the average tells us that the child is largely what the home has made him.”

“If you want to give the devil a nervous breakdown, just get up every day and see how much good you can do.”