“If the answer is simple, God is speaking.”

“Men and women may devise plans to satisfy their inner longings, but in the midst of all the “religions” of the world, God’s way is available in the Bible for all who will come to Him on His terms.”

“It's in the misery of some unnamed slum that the next killer virus will emerge.”

“I see my life in terms of music.”

“I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”

“Many people are willing to have Jesus as part of their lives—as long as it doesn’t cost them anything. They may even profess faith in Jesus and join a church. But Jesus to them is almost like an insurance policy—something they obtain and then forget about until they die. What keeps you from being His disciple?”

“Great doors of opportunity swing on the tiny hinges of obedience.”

“A primary object should be the education of our youth in the science of government. In a republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty more pressing than communicating it to those who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the country?”

“Going in the company of negative people is just like having thick muddy soil underfoot... They will only draw you back if you don't tear them off! Move out of your current disposal with the intention of getting to your true destination!”

“You can literally force yourself to be courteous, happy and enthusiastic with every person you meet. After you have forced yourself to be so for a short period of time... the habit takes over.”

“Two thousand years ago God invited a morally corrupt world to the foot of the cross. There God held your sins and mine to the flames until every last vestige of our guilt was consumed.”

“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.”

“Your decision to be, have and do something out of ordinary entails facing  difficulties that are out of the ordinary as well. Sometimes your greatest asset is  simply your ability to stay with it longer than anyone else.”

“But you cannot go through the Door of Destiny without passing through the Hall of Haters.”

“Things don't just happen. They are made to happen.”