I try to look on all the great things God’s done, and not focus on the negative. It’s a perspective.

In the Bible, we first encounter God when he sides with a bunch of slaves against a powerful Pharaoh, an act of grace freely given.

Speak ill of no man, but speak all the good you know of everybody.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

If pleasures are greatest in anticipation, just remember that this is also true of trouble.

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

A religion that takes no account of practical affairs and does not help to solve them is no religion.

We are each made for goodness, love and compassion. Our lives are transformed as much as the world is when we live with these truths.

All that the future holds in store for each sacred child of God will be shaped by his or her parents, family, friends, and teachers. Thus, our faith now becomes part of our posterity’s faith later.

We like security: we like the pope to be infallible in matters of faith, and grave doctors to be so in moral questions so that we can feel reassured.

In a magazine, one can get – from cover to cover – 15 to 20 different ideas about life and how to live it.

Where love is, there God is also.

If God can’t get you to obey Him concerning your money, he won’t get to anything else you got.

I have been influenced in my thinking by both west and east.

After it is all over, the religion of man is his most important possession.

Age merely shows what children we remain.

No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching but at the same time a steady eye.

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.

A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants.

Feeling sorry for ourselves is the most useless waste of energy on the planet. It does absolutely no good. We can’t let our circumstances or what others do or don’t do control us. We can decide to be happy regardless.

I have been chosen by God Almighty to be one of his messengers.

One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

Happiness is within the reach of everyone, rich or poor. Yet comparatively few people are happy. I believe the reason for this is that the majority don’t recognize happiness even when it is within their grasp.

The world is indebted for all triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.

The truths of religion are never so well understood as by those who have lost the power of reason.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

We shall see but a little way if we require to understand what we see.

Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.

Prayer indeed is good, but while calling on the gods a man should himself lend a hand.

Everything is clearer when you’re in love.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.

If a man reaches the heart of his own religion, he has reached the heart of the others, too. There is only one God, and there are many paths to him.

The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.

God proved His love on the Cross. When Christ hung, and bled, and died, it was God saying to the world, ‚I love you.‘

I’m just glad I play for Coach Belichick.

No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

Enlightenment is always there. Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment. If you breathe in and are aware that you are alive – that you can touch the miracle of being alive – then that is a kind of enlightenment.

However my parents – both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing quirk that would never pay a mortgage or secure a pension.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us – dreamers and indolent… It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich – these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

I really believe in the philosophy that you create your own universe. I’m just trying to create a good one for myself.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

We cannot always oblige; but we can always speak obligingly.

I really thought I was on the way out. My husband Blake saved my life. Often I don’t know what I do, then the next day the memory returns. And then I am engulfed in shame.

I’ve taught a lot about prayer over the years and how it is really just talking to God.

We can approach God’s throne with boldness because we are confident in the power of what Jesus accomplished for us at the cross.

When you make a mistake and the devil comes and tells you ‚You’re no good,‘ you don’t have to take on the guilt and condemnation he wants to put on you. No! You can immediately confess your mistake to God, thank Him for forgiving you and cleansing you with the blood of Jesus, and move forward in the victory of His grace and forgiveness.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth.

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

In all my work, I try to say – ‚You may be given a load of sour lemons, why not try to make a dozen lemon meringue pies?‘

Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

I don’t let my religious world get too complicated.

I know that I came into the world with what I call ‚big dharma‘ – with a blueprint to teach self-reliance and a positive loving approach to large numbers of people all over the globe. I am ever so grateful for the circumstances of my life that allowed me to be pretty much left alone and to develop as I was so intended in this incarnation.