I think that man has a fundamental obligation to extract from himself and from the earth all that it can give; and this obligation is all the more imperative that we are absolutely ignorant of what limits – they may still be very distant – God has imposed on our natural understanding and power.

Life isn’t fair, but God is.

Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.

When we’re looking for compassion, we need someone who is deeply rooted, is able to bend and, most of all, embraces us for our strengths and struggles.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

We may have our private opinions but why should they be a bar to the meeting of hearts?

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.

Great is the hand that holds dominion over man by a scribbled name.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought if one does achieve them, or worth worrying about if they evade one or are slow in coming. All that is really worth while is action – faithful action, for the world, and in God.

To be sure I must; and therefore I may assume that your silence gives consent.

My wife and I don’t compete. We know each other’s preferences, and we work to provide those for each other. One will take over when the other is faced with something he or she dislikes. That’s what friends do.

I was born on a full moon. Both my children were born on full moons, too. Some people say that’s scary. It is what it is, man, I don’t be trippin‘. I couldn’t tell God when I wanted to be born.

I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call ‚the last illusion.‘ The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that it knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on.

Hide our ignorance as we will, an evening of wine soon reveals it.

The Medici created and destroyed me.

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet – the only one in the whole Milky Way – with a century of transportation whoopee.

Wine gives a man nothing… it only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.

To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.

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

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

Proselytism is solemn nonsense; it makes no sense. We need to get to know each other, listen to each other and improve our knowledge of the world around us.

God has given us two hands, one to receive with and the other to give with.

When I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society.

Real politics are the possession and distribution of power.

God can cause opportunity to find you. He has unexpected blessings where you suddenly meet the right person, or suddenly your health improves, or suddenly you’re able to pay off your house. That’s God shifting things in your favor.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.

I believe many people feel like God is mad at them. One day I put a post on Facebook that said, ‚God is not mad at you.‘ Within a few hours, we literally had thousands of positive responses from people saying things like, ‚That is exactly what I needed to hear today.‘ Obviously, this is a message we need to hear.

The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.

Nature, like man, sometimes weeps from gladness.

The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.

A child wants things to be a certain way. When you get to be an adult, you just understand that some people are good, some are not, and you can’t be naive.

We tend to mistake music for the physical object.

The little man is still a man.

If you believe in science, like I do, you believe that there are certain laws that are always obeyed.

Desire is the essence of a man.

You can see neurosis from below – as a sickness – as most psychiatrists see it. Or you can understand it as a compassionate man might: respecting the neurosis as a fumbling and inefficient effort toward good ends.

When you are spiritually connected, you are not looking for occasions to be offended, and you are not judging and labeling others. You are in a state of grace in which you know you are connected to God and thus free from the effects of anyone or anything external to yourself.

No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

Each one prays to God according to his own light.

The major religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, they deny somehow that God has a feminine face. However, if you go to the holy texts, you see there is this feminine presence.

Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear.

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.

A clever man commits no minor blunders.

The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.

To be able to endure odium is the first art to be learned by those who aspire to power.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

There’s always an element of self delusion among people who believe they ought to be President. There’s an underestimation of your opponent and an overestimation of your own abilities. This is compatible with being rich and powerful, the idea that we were blessed by God because we deserve to be blessed.

I do know this… I seem to reach a lot of previously unchurched people. So many people have told me they never went to church until they heard our message of hope that God is a good God who desires to bless those who are faithful and obedient to Him through Jesus Christ.

The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.

I don’t spend that much time being introspective, believe it or not. All I know is that I grew up not questioning God because that’s how you are. God was there like the birds and the wind.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

The way people look at me these days – that’s the same way I looked at President Obama before I met him. We tend to forget that people who’ve attained a certain position are human.