Cast away your sloth, your lethargy, your coldness, or whatever interferes with your chaste and pure love for Christ, your soul’s husband. Make Him the source, the center, and the circumference of all your soul’s range of delight.

A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.

I just think that trusting God means we’re going to have unanswered questions, and God is so much bigger than us, we’re never going to understand them all.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy.

I always try to put a seed of hope into people’s hearts. I’m not there to teach them doctrine necessarily, but to let them know that God is a good God, and has a plan for their lives. Hopefully, that will restore their faith, or draw them into faith.

Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding.

You practice mindfulness, on the one hand, to be calm and peaceful. On the other hand, as you practice mindfulness and live a life of peace, you inspire hope for a future of peace.

It’s lack that gives us inspiration. It’s not fullness.

I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God’s hands, that I still possess.

I do put a lot of God in my music, but not because I’m super religious. There are a lot of demons in my music, too. I acknowledge both.

What I cry out for, like every being, with my whole life and all my earthly passion, is something very different from an equal to cherish: it is a God to adore.

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.

There is a fundamental question we all have to face. How are we to live our lives; by what principles and moral values will we be guided and inspired?

I’m a big perfectionist! I’m trying to channel super-confident women like Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey and Beyonce, because I realized that if you want something, you really have to go for it, just like they do.

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.

My message is that God is a good God.

My dear sisters, whatever your calling, whatever your circumstances, we need your impressions, your insights, and your inspiration. We need you to speak up and speak out in ward and stake councils.

There are techniques of Buddhism, such as meditation, that anyone can adopt. And, of course, there are Christian monks and nuns who already use Buddhist methods in order to develop their devotion, compassion, and ability to forgive.

I didn’t have nothin‘ going for me… school, home… until I found something I loved, which was music, and that changed everything.

My problem is I am Christian, so I think other people must have success, too; it’s not about me.

As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.

Unless and until you inspire the people, you will not get results. Imposition will never give you the results. Inspiration will always give you the results.

Even the best teams can fail. Celebrities can fade. There is only One in whom your faith is always safe, and that is in the Lord Jesus Christ. And you need to let your faith show!

I read everything, but generally more fact than fiction – especially autobiographies and biographies. I’ve read ‚Long Walk to Freedom‘ by Nelson Mandela at least twice on holiday. Every time, I’m totally awed by his vision, strength and forgiveness. I feel honoured to have got to know him and his wonderful wife Graca over the years.

Spending time with God through prayer and His Word is a prerequisite for having a great life and fulfilling your purpose.

Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.

I subscribe to the myth that an artist’s creativity comes from torment. Once that’s fixed, what do you draw on?

When the mind is empty, silent, when it is in a state of complete negation – which is not blankness, nor the opposite of being positive, but a totally different state in which all thought has ceased – only then is it possible for that which is unnameable to come into being.

Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

I wake up every day inspiring myself, because God gave me life.

However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

One element of Madonna’s career that really takes center stage is how many times she’s reinvented herself. It’s easier to stay in one look, one comfort zone, one musical style. It’s inspiring to see someone whose only predictable quality is being unpredictable.

Let a man who has to make his fortune in life remember this maxim: Attacking is the only secret. Dare and the world yields, or if it beats you sometimes, dare it again and you will succeed.

For where God built a church, there the Devil would also build a chapel.

The greatest legacy one can pass on to one’s children and grandchildren is not money or other material things accumulated in one’s life, but rather a legacy of character and faith.

The Bible is the cradle wherein Christ is laid.

Every day I pray about all I do.

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

There’s no formula.

We hand folks over to God’s mercy, and show none ourselves.

The hope, the hope that lives in the breast of the black American, is just so tremendous that it overwhelms me sometimes.

Sacrifice, discipline and prayer are essential. We gain strength through God’s word. We receive grace from the sacrament. And when we fumble due to sin – and it’s gonna happen – confession puts us back on the field.

When I write, I write about my surroundings. Sometimes it’s light, and sometimes it gets very dark.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

There’s nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It’s a thing no married man knows anything about.

Whenever I write a novel, music just sort of naturally slips in (much like cats do, I suppose).

We’re not like robots. God promises to guide us through the Holy Spirit, but He gives us the freedom to make our own decisions.

I know My God commands, whose power no power resists.

Most of us have hoped and prayed for something to happen a certain way, but it didn’t. And when this happened, we had a choice to make: to react with offense toward God or to trust Him anyway.

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock and roll or Christianity.

When you feel like it’s too hard to obey God, remember that He will never tell you to do something without giving you the grace, power and ability to do it.

Prayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening.

I always dreamt of holding the bat and winning games for India. That was my inspiration to take up cricket.

If I could give you information of my life, it would be to show how a woman of very ordinary ability has been led by God in strange and unaccustomed paths to do In His service what He has done in her. And if I could tell you all, you would see how God has done all, and I nothing.

There are some people who need to wear a label round their necks to show that they are Christians at all, or else we might mistake them for sinners, their actions are so like those of the ungodly.

If you believe in prayer at all, expect God to hear you. If you do not expect, you will not have. God will not hear you unless you believe He will hear you; but if you believe He will, He will be as good as your faith.

I’m a Christian – I really don’t believe in UFOs.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

So I say to you, Ask and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.