Strong emotions such as passion and bliss are indications that you’re connected to Spirit, or ‚inspired,‘ if you will. When you’re inspired, you activate dormant forces, and the abundance you seek in any form comes streaming into your life.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents‘ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees.

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

Never regret what you don’t write.

You see, you are a spirit, you have a soul, and you live in a body. You have emotions, you have thoughts, you have a will, and you have a conscience. You are a complex being! And Jesus came to heal every single part of you. There’s not one part that He doesn’t want to make completely whole.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

When it comes down to my brand, We the Best, we’re about the people and whoever is passionate and in love the way I’m in love when it comes down to the headphones I’m promoting.

No matter what has happened to you in the past or what is going on in your life right now, it has no power to keep you from having an amazingly good future if you will walk by faith in God. God loves you! He wants you to live with victory over sin so you can possess His promises for your life today!

There are two ways of exerting one’s strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.

The secret is not to give up hope. It’s very hard not to because if you’re really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side.

In the Bible, we first encounter God when he sides with a bunch of slaves against a powerful Pharaoh, an act of grace freely given.

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.

The Jesuits have a vow to obey the pope, but if the pope is a Jesuit, maybe he should have a vow to obey the superior general… I feel like I’m still a Jesuit in terms of my spirituality, what I have in my heart.

My mother is a strong, wonderful woman. I could never be anything she didn’t want me to be.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.

Motives reveal why we do what we do, which is actually more important to God than what we’re doing.

The sun is gone, but I have a light.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.

On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail. Reasons the card, but passion the gale.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Wherever the invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, speak the very truth, as your life and conscience teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting hearts of men with new hope and new revelation.

Not having hope is not an excuse for not doing something.

I sang a song at my sister’s wedding. My mother forced me into that, too. But that one felt all right.

People say maybe we have a soul and chimpanzees don’t. I feel that it’s quite possible that if we have souls, chimpanzees have souls as well.

Within the covers of the Bible are the answers for all the problems men face.

You can have religion with spirituality. You can also have religion without spirituality.

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

I’m just telling you, God permits things in our lives sometimes for reasons that we do not understand yet because of the spiritual level that we’re on. We can’t have any understanding of it, because we’re not at a place of spiritual growth yet where we understand the deeper things of God.

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

Success in its highest and noblest form calls for peace of mind and enjoyment and happiness which come only to the man who has found the work that he likes best.

The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.

When people are connected, we can just do some great things. They have the opportunity to get access to jobs, education, health, communications. We have the opportunity to bring the people we care about closer to us. It really makes a big difference.

I want people to follow their dreams, yes… but I’m not interested in telling young black kids how to be rappers… I want to show them that there’s so many other paths you can take, besides a rapper or basketball player.

Whenever I’m confused about something, I ask God to reveal the answers to my questions, and he does.

I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at any given moment. I love, love, love doing theater.

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

Do not think of your faults, still less of other’s faults; look for what is good and strong, and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.

The most eloquent prayer is the prayer through hands that heal and bless.

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.

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 truth of it is that every singer out there with songs on the radio is raising the next generation, so make your words count.

The loss of young first love is so painful that it borders on the ludicrous.

It’s impossible to live a life totally free of feelings. God created all of us to be emotional creatures, and feelings are a big part of our lives.

You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world’s problems at once but don’t ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

All I know is that, thanks to a sort of habit which has always been ingrained in me, I have never, at any moment of my life, experienced the least difficulty in addressing myself to God as to a supreme Someone.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

Have you not noticed that love is silence? It may be while holding the hand of another, or looking lovingly at a child, or taking in the beauty of an evening. Love has no past or future, and so it is with this extraordinary state of silence.

Pain and foolishness lead to great bliss and complete knowledge, for Eternal Wisdom created nothing under the sun in vain.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

People have different emotional levels. Especially when you’re young.

My readers – and I get 400 emails for a day, my readers normally they say, well, you understand me, and I answer, you do understand me also. We are in the same level.

Jesus said, ‚The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.‘ I think if he lived nowadays, instead of ‚kingdom,‘ he would have said, ‚dimension.‘ And ‚heaven‘ refers to a sense of vastness or spaciousness.

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