I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

I believe that some of us who were kept by God a long while before we found Him love Him better perhaps than we should have done if we had received Him directly, and we can preach better to others – we can speak more of His loving-kindness and tender mercy.

The Corps is in good hands, and it’s been a privilege to serve with the Leathernecks. Now it’s time to go.

The high destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule.

Time stays, we go.

I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters – and the church does not speak for me.

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.

I’m grateful for the opportunities God gave me to minister to people in high places; people in power have spiritual and personal needs like everyone else, and often they have no one to talk to.

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

You tell me: Can you live crushed under the weight of the present? Without a memory of the past and without the desire to look ahead to the future by building something, a future, a family? Can you go on like this? This, to me, is the most urgent problem that the Church is facing.

I did 20 years in the Navy. I joined the Navy right out of high school and went through Navy boot camp, went to SEAL training, got done with that, and then showed up at a SEAL team, where I did 20 years. That was pretty much my whole adult life.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

To gather with God’s people in united adoration of the Father is as necessary to the Christian life as prayer.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

Many people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‚real‘ world.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I’m so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don’t have the guts to take their names out of the book.

Each life makes its own immitation of immortality.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

To insult someone we call him ‚bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, ‚human‘ might be the greater insult.

The names of Dingane and Bambata, Hintsa and Makana, Squngthi and Dalasile, Moshoeshoe and Sekhukhuni, were praised as the glory of the entire African nation. I hoped then that life might offer me the opportunity to serve my people and make my own humble contribution to their freedom struggle.

Life is like a wheel. Sooner or later, it always come around to where you started again.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

We need to avoid the spiritual sickness of a church that is wrapped up in its own world: when a church becomes like this, it grows sick.

We are anthill men upon an anthill world.

My grandfather was smart and had a whole lot of pride. He didn’t speak a terrible amount, but you could tell there was a ton on his mind – like a quiet acceptance of how life had turned out.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

The Church is like a great tree whose roots must be energetically anchored in the earth while its leaves are serenely exposed to the bright sunlight. In this way, she sums up a whole gamut of beats in a single living and all-embracing act, each one of which corresponds to a particular degree or a possible form of spiritualisation.

In a long meter hymn, a singer – they call it ‚lays out a line.‘ And then the whole church joins in in repeating that line. And they form a wall of harmony so tight, you can’t wedge a pin between it.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.

Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

I’ve never preached one sermon on money, on just finances. I want to stay away from it.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

What we live by we die by.

A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

God tries you in certain, certain ways. Some people are rich, and they believe in God. They lose the money, things get hard, they get weak and quit going to church. Quit serving God like they did.

Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

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

As a Christian, you forgive, and you feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and you visit the sick and comfort the lonely. If I’m a true follower of my lord and saviour Jesus Christ, I got to do the things you’re supposed to be doing.

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

You can be committed to Church but not committed to Christ, but you cannot be committed to Christ and not committed to church.

You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.

It’s a question of whether we’re going to go forward into the future, or past to the back.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

I have never changed my message. I preach the Bible, and I preach it with authority.

I’ve been known to preach.

When I am angry I can pray well and preach well.

A mother defends herself with a heart filled with love before doing so with words. I wonder whether there is any love for the church in the hearts of those who pay so much attention to the scandals.

We might as well die as to go on living like this.

Few men would dare to read their own autobiography if all their deeds were recorded in it; few can look back upon their entire career without a blush.

In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider.

Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.