If you make listening and observation your occupation you will gain much more than you can by talk.

And we are never too old to study the Bible. Each time the lessons are studied comes some new meaning, some new thought which will make us better.

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering – because you can’t take it in all at once.

Each day brings opportunity for decisions for eternity.

You make yourself broad. You make yourself appealing. ‚Hey, y’all, I’m cool with everybody.‘ That’s my message.

The only way to get love is to be lovable. It’s very irritating if you have a lot of money. You’d like to think you could write a check: ‚I’ll buy a million dollars‘ worth of love.‘ But it doesn’t work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.

I know that when I pray, something wonderful happens. Not just to the person or persons for whom I’m praying, but also something wonderful happens to me. I’m grateful that I’m heard.

It’s considered acceptable in our culture to approach perfect strangers, as often or not who may be in extremis, and evangelise. I don’t see why that’s considered a normal thing.

You have to be careful about how much you reveal to people that look up to you so much.

It is a grand mistake to think of being great without goodness and I pronounce it as certain that there was never a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.

I think you can have 10,000 explanations for failure, but no good explanation for success.

Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.

My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.

Questions are never indiscreet, answers sometimes are.

The career of a sage is of two kinds: He is either honored by all in the world, Like a flower waving its head, Or else he disappears into the silent forest.

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

If what you are doing is not moving you towards your goals, then it’s moving you away from your goals.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

I know I want to always do the best I can.

To make headway, improve your head.

The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

In order to have friends, you must first be one.

My mother always taught us that if people don’t agree with you, the important thing is to listen to them. But if you’ve listened to them carefully and you still think that you’re right, then you must have the courage of your convictions.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

Never ask anyone over 70 how they feel. They’ll tell you.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water’s edge.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

If you would lift me up you must be on higher ground.

We’re in the last days, man – I truly, in my heart, believe that. It’s written. I could go on with biblical situations and things my grandma told me. But it’s about being at peace with myself and making good with the people around me.

One might say that our words are a movie screen that reveals what we have been thinking and the attitudes we have.

The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.

I put up my thumb and it blotted out the planet Earth.

Never say no when a client asks for something, even if it is the moon. You can always try, and anyhow there is plenty of time afterwards to explain that it was not possible.

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.

Aim for the highest.

I can never be safe; I always try and go against the grain. As soon as I accomplish one thing, I just set a higher goal. That’s how I’ve gotten to where I am.

If we’re going to bring out the best in people, we, too, need to sow seeds of encouragement.

It is more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city.

It’s my old girl that advises. She has the head. But I never own to it before her. Discipline must be maintained.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

The only shame is to have none.

You can’t go backward in life.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

The idea of recognising your strengths and using them in as versatile a way as you can is cool to me.

Silence speaks so much louder than screaming tantrums. Never give anyone an excuse to say that you’re crazy.

The major advances in speed of communication and ability to interact took place more than a century ago. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph was far more radical than that from telephone to email!

The truth is, somebody is always talking about you, so you have to let it go… if it’s not a part of your God-given destiny.

I have observed that society in general always seems to honor its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

There is no sin except stupidity.

The men I idolized built their bodies and became somebody – like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger – and I thought, ‚That can be me.‘ So I started working out. The funny thing is I didn’t realize back then that I was having a defining moment.

I just have always felt that people don’t change, circumstances change.

I have owed you this letter for a very long time-but my fingers have avoided the pencil as though it were an old and poisoned tool.

I once did a three-hour interview with Radio Oxford only to be told the microphone hadn’t picked me up.

Alas! You complain that your soul is out of tune. Then ask the Master to tune the heart-strings.

Clever men are good, but they are not the best.

It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself.