I spent most of the early years of my walk with God focused on what was wrong with me. Most of us probably do that, hoping to change ourselves.

Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don’t do any good, but they don’t necessarily do any harm. It’s touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I’ve got my just desserts.

Your life is like a play with several acts. Some of the characters who enter have short roles to play, others, much larger. Some are villains and others are good guys. But all of them are necessary; otherwise, they wouldn’t be in the play. Embrace them all, and move on to the next act.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.

To understand the power of the priesthood, we must know its limitations.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.

It’s always appealing to play a character that has to overcome himself as well as an obstacle. It makes the drama so much deeper.

I’m not a natural performer or exhibitionist. When I was younger, I hated the focus, and it made me feel strange.

No poet or orator has ever existed who believed there was any better than himself.

Without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure.

Don’t complain. The Israelites wasted forty years murmuring and complaining in the wilderness, when they could have just obeyed God and entered into their Promised Land.

When your soul is resting, your emotions are okay, your mind is okay, and your will is at peace with God, not resisting what He’s doing.

You and I, the people of God, have permission to come before the throne of Heaven at any time we will, and we are encouraged to come there with great boldness.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities.

I know my flaws before other people point them out to me.

There is a power in God’s gospel beyond all description.

God is, even though the whole world deny him. Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.

My father, who was jailed for stealing on more than one occasion, just abandoned his fatherly responsibilities and disappeared. I grew up working from the time I was nine years of age. Money was a big issue everywhere I lived.

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.

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.

Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.

I’m not the most patient of people.

Asking is the beginning of receiving. Make sure you don’t go to the ocean with a teaspoon. At least take a bucket so the kids won’t laugh at you.

People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.

If our condition were truly happy, we would not seek diversion from it in order to make ourselves happy.

That nice, soft pillow and the warm blanket, and it’s all comfortable, and no one wants to leave that comfort – but if you can wake up early in the morning, get a head start on everyone else that’s still sleeping, get productive time doing things that you need to do – that’s a huge piece to moving your life forward.

O God, we praise Thee for keeping us till this day, and for the full assurance that Thou wilt never let us go.

I’ve been running a full marathon every year for more than 20 years, and my record is getting worse. Getting older, getting worse. It’s natural.

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

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.

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.

Never find fault with the absent.

I am a nuclear physicist by training and a deeply committed Christian. I don’t have any doubt in my own mind about God who created the entire universe. But I don’t adhere to passages that so and so was created 4,000 years before Christ, and things of that kind.

If you gain, you gain all. If you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then, without hesitation, that He exists.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?

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.

Naturally, everybody has certain things they wish they hadn’t done in life. They wish they hadn’t kicked their dog when they were ten or something.

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs.

I believe that God’s dream is that we be successful in our careers, and that we be able to send our kids to college. I don’t mean that everyone is going to be rich, and I preach a lot on blooming where you’re planted. But I don’t have the mindset that money is a bad thing.

To add value to others, one must first value others.

So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.

I’m sure like everyone else I’m not always the happiest if I don’t do a good job in quali or the race or whatever, so I think beating myself up sometimes makes me work harder.

I’m not trying to follow a set of rules and stuff. I’m just living my life.

There is nothing happens to any person but what was in his power to go through with.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

Life can be boring unless you put some effort into it.

Frankly, I think that the news industry is critically important because it points out things and surfaces truths that can often be uncomfortable. I think that that’s working, and the spotlight has been pointed on things that we have a responsibility to do better, and I accept that.

I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

Prayer is not an old woman’s idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.

Faith never makes a confession.