“If you truly love life, don't waste time because time is what life is made of.”

“One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.”

“People cannot change people. Only God can get inside a person's heart and cause him or her to want to change.”

“Don’t feed your body and keep your spirit starving. Butter bread for your body and living bread for your spirit. Read the Bible every day and keep your spirit away from hunger.”

“Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance, the only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”

“Here's my strategy on the Cold War: we win, they lose.”

“Prayers have no boundaries. They can leap miles and continents and be translated instantly into any language.”

“But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.”

“Jim Sundberg says, “Discover your uniqueness; then discipline yourself to develop it.”

“You have to come to your closed doors before you’ll ever get to your open doors.”

“This is our dilemma--either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste--or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. [. . .] Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.”

“Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it’s a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.”

“There are no conditions to which a man may not become accustomed, particularly if he sees that they are accepted by those about him.”

“Nothing truly valuable can be achieved except by the unselfish cooperation of many individuals.”

“Galatians 5:18 asks, “Why don’t you choose to be led by the Spirit and so escape the erratic compulsions of a law-dominated existence?” (MSG).”