It’s always wonderful to get to know women, with the mystery and the joy and the depth. If you can make a woman laugh, you’re seeing the most beautiful thing on God’s Earth.

What we need to understand is that when traditions become laws, rules, obligations and expectations others put on us that we don’t want to fulfill, then they lose real meaning and steal the joy from our lives. And if we’re too religious, we won’t be able to be led by the Holy Spirit and enjoy an intimate relationship with Him.

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Joy is prayer; joy is strength: joy is love; joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.

I don’t like cream puff, corny guys. Usually, they are the nice guys, the ones that won’t hurt you. They’ll pull out the chair for you and the whole nine yards. Everything is perfect and boring.

My beauty secret is absolutely no sun.

A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.

Every man’s reputation proceeds from those of his own household.

He who hath many friends hath none.

Though lovers be lost, love shall not.

As a sportsperson, the best thing is people recognising you and loving you for what you do. For me, glamour is 100 people in the hotel feeling happy to see you.

I don’t think that women need to smell interesting.

Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions.

That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he’s wise.

Were it not for imagination a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.

Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind.

Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing.

To love is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

Who, being loved, is poor?

Women – always in trouble with them, but can’t live without them.

Marriage is a school itself. Also, having children. Becoming a father changed my whole life. It taught me as if by revelation.

I purposely don’t talk about money, because people are already skeptical about TV preachers. But I do say that I want you to be blessed. To me, prosperity is having health, having great children, having peace, good relationships. It’s not about the money.

If someone lies, well, you had a choice to trust that person or not. I think the way my father raised me, well, he trusted everybody. And that worked for him.

You can’t be in love with a Google search.

The only way to have a friend is to be one.

Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.

More than anything else, I want the folks back at home to think right of me.

I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.

I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird.

I’ll never graduate from collagen.

I love stories about women.

We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love.

One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.

When we tell the story of our own conversion, I would have it done with great sorrow, remembering what we used to be, and with great joy and gratitude, remembering how little we deserve these things.

I think what it really is, is that I date creative people. And I think that what intimidates them is not my purse; it’s my mind.

No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served. But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service which is rendered in a spirit of joy.

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.

The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-coloured world.

At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.

You gotta understand: I believe a woman should praise the man, the king. If you holding it down for your woman, I feel like the woman should praise. And the man should praise the queen.

The old cathedrals are good, but the great blue dome that hangs over everything is better.

All the women in my life have been librarians, English teachers and book sellers.

Always make those above you feel comfortably superior. In your desire to please or impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite – inspire fear and insecurity.

When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.

Rejoicing in our joy, not suffering over our suffering, makes someone a friend.

I think everybody deserves an equal amount of appreciation whether how old they are, but I mean, I’m cool with the praise. I’m good.

Love can do much, but duty more.

‚The Story of Us‘ is about running into someone I had been in a relationship with at an awards show, and we were seated a few seats away from each other. I just wanted to say to him, ‚Is this killing you? Because it’s killing me.‘ But I didn’t. Because I couldn’t. Because we both had these silent shields up.

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.

Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.

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

I’ve never had a divorce, but I’ve seen so many of my friends, my sister, my family go through that stuff, so I try to write for the people that can’t write about it. I take on their sorrow, so I’m able to kind of express it, or their joy.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words.

Sometimes you can’t prioritise family and you feel guilty.

Jealousy is just love and hate at the same time.

Truth is everybody is going to hurt you: you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.

If I held you any closer I would be on the other side of you.