“The table that cannot stand upright, is an insult to the carpenter who makes it. God made us perfectly; so when we refuse to carry out the functions we were created for, our father loses the glory He deserves!”

“He knew she was there by the joy and terror that took possession of his heart [...] Everything was lit up by her. She was the smile that brightened everything around.”

“Happiness depends upon ourselves.”

“Give a smile always, not once a while. Life's great when you wake up and ignore the scaring nightmares you had. Forget the bitter bile; life's sweet beyond River Nile. File your teeth out and smile!”

“I'm getting old, that's the thing! What's in me now won't be there anymore.”

“The very essence of all power to influence lies in getting the other person to participate.” Influence is an invitation anyone can make to another person.”

“And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking. And he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt, in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”

“Often, out of our greatest rejection comes our greatest direction.”

“...a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”

“It’s easier to move from failure to success than from excuses to success.”

“Before you can positively and passionately pursue what your heart love to do, you must first be grateful to the one who gave you such a heart to love such a thing!”

“Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of--something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possesed your soul have been but hints of it--tantalizing glimspes, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the things we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”

“Friendship that insists upon agreement on all things isn't worth the name.”

“You have to trust God even when you don’t get what you want.”

“I only know what I have seen. What I have not seen doesn't make my heart heavy.”