“Every hour, stop and ask: Am I really present in this moment? If not, what are my thoughts focused on? Doing this often will help you return to the present moment.”

“Where students talk about being independent and on their own, you will find them practicing the most rigid conformity in dress, in speech, in moral attitudes, and in thinking. Sometimes they follow fashion at the expense of integrity. They dread to be alone. They do not want to stand out or be different. They want to conform. After they graduate from college, many of these young people want nothing more than a good job with a big firm, and a home somewhere in suburbia. But they don’t find security.”

“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.”

“While life on earth offers many choices, eternity offers only two: heaven or hell. Your relationship to God on earth will determine your relationship to him in eternity.”

“The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to.”

“Wisdom is doing now what you are going to be happy with later on”

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too?”

“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.”

“I will never attend an anti-war rally; if you have a peace rally, invite me.”

“DEFINITENESS OF PURPOSE, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning DESIRE to possess it.”

“The Key to Success is Action”

“Some things you go through in life may not feel good initially, but they will work out for your good if you keep going forward and trust God to strengthen you each step of the way.”

“Do not tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done.” —James J. Ling”

“every time you smile at someone, it is an action of love, a gift to that person, a beautiful thing”

“Christianity has its roots in the deep, firm soil of history. Jesus’ incarnation—God invading human history with His presence in the form of man—is on the record. Every time you write the date, you attest to the fact that God entered human history.”