“The reality is that we will continue to hear negative information from many sources. It lies in our will to decide whether to discard them into the waste bin or record them into our brains!”

“I confess to wincing every so often at a poorly chosen word, a mangled sentence, an expression of emotion that seems indulgent or overly practiced. I have the urge to cut the book by fifty pages or so, possessed as I am with a keener appreciation for brevity.”

“Confident people do not concentrate on their weaknesses; they develop and maximize their strengths.”

“Our habits control our lives. We shape our habits; then our habits shape us.”

“We need to be enthusiastic! Too many of us walk around with long faces looking and feeling worn-out. But the human heart was made for passion, for strong desire to reach for something beyond ourselves.”

“Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.”

“The night is a tunnel, she thought, a hole into tomorrow...”

“Peace between countries must rest on the solid foundation of love between individuals.

“If you want to be used by God, you must care about what God cares about;” 

“Whatever you do well in the darkness tells more about who you are than what you do best in light. Watch out!”

“Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”

“A suffering person does not need a lecture—he needs a listener.”

“And the candle by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grieg, and evil, flared up brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been in darkness, sputtered, grew dim, and went out forever.”

“When you have nothing left but God,you have more than enough to start over again.” 

“Involuntarily it appeared to me that there, somewhere, was someone who amused himself by watching how I lived for thirty or forty years: learning, developing, maturing in body and mind, and how, having with matured mental powers reached the summit of life from which it all lay before me, I stood on that summit -- like an arch-fool -- seeing clearly that there is nothing in life, and that there has been and will be nothing. And he was amused... But whether that "someone" laughing at me existed or not, I was none the better off. I could give no reasonable meaning to any single action or to my whole life. I was only surprised that I could have avoided understanding this from the very beginning -- it has been so long known to all. Today or tomorrow sickness and death will come (they had come already) to those I love or to me; nothing will remain but stench and worms. Sooner or later my affairs, whatever they may be, will be forgotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any effort?... How can man fail to see this? And how go on living? That is what is surprising! One can only live while one is intoxicated with life; as soon as one is sober it is impossible not to see that it is all a mere fraud and a stupid fraud! That is precisely what it is: there is nothing either amusing or witty about it, it is simply cruel and stupid.”