Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.

Don’t gain the world and lose your soul; wisdom is better than silver or gold.

Through the ages, many of His children have had access to the blessings of the gospel, but many more have not.

Would that I were a dry well, and that the people tossed stones into me, for that would be easier than to be a spring of flowing water that the thirsty pass by, and from which they avoid drinking.

Lord sanctify us. Oh! That Thy spirit might come and saturate every faculty, subdue every passion, and use every power of our nature for obedience to God.

A sad soul can kill quicker than a germ.

God doesn’t do things halfway. He goes all out! When God does something, it’s not just barely enough, mediocre or lukewarm.

My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I’m concerned, love is absolutely everything.

After getting out of the service and going into baseball I never wanted to do anything else.

If one accepts the terms of the covenant and obeys God’s law, he or she receives the blessings associated with the covenant.

Admiration is a very short-lived passion, that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object.

I have learned from personal experience that putting trust in God means there will be some unanswered questions. That was a hard lesson for me because I naturally want to understand everything… to know what’s going on so I can feel like I’m in control.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

I’m actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.

Love in its essence is spiritual fire.

Our God is a forgiving God.

Honoring the priesthood fosters respect, respect promotes reverence, and reverence invites revelation.

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

Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth.

Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.

Man is only great when he acts from passion.

Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.

Passion for fame: A passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.

My audience went, ‚Wait, why is she singing jazz? What’s going on?‘ And then they went, ‚Oh, because she can. Because she loves it.‘ And jazz, a music invented by the African-American community, is the greatest art form, I believe, to have ever come out of this country.

I have learned to know God. I have recast my social belief… All my admirers are married; most of my friends are dead; and I stand with all the world before me, where to choose a path to make in it.

I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays… and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way.

A saint serves others, knowing that the more one serves, the greater the opportunity for the Spirit to sanctify and purify.

I love story songs because I’ve always loved books.

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.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?

The gods‘ service is tolerable, man’s intolerable.

He best keeps from anger who remembers that God is always looking upon him.

God and I have a great relationship, but we both see other people.

I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

I cannot read a single word of the Hindoos without being elevated.

I always say that people should not rush to change religions. There is real value in finding the spiritual resources you need in your home religion.

Life isn’t fair, but God is.

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

Choosing an attitude of faith will release peace out of your spirit and into your soul.

Your body has space within you that cannot die.

Neither of my parents went to church, but they did everything that you needed to do to be Christian. That’s something a Quaker would call an intimation of the divine.

Control thy passions lest they take vengence on thee.

God is not so wary as we, else He would give us no friends, lest we forget Him! The charms of the heaven in the bush are superseded, I fear, by the heaven in the hand, occasionally.

My family, frankly, they weren’t folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn’t raise me in the church, so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead.

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.

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

The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

For me, it’s about the way I carry myself and the way I treat other people. My relationship and how I feel about God and what He does for me, is something deeply personal. It’s where I came from, my family, I was brought up in a religious household and that’s very important to me.

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.

My message is that God is a good God.

Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.

We feel and know that we are eternal.

It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.

The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.

If you die you’re completely happy and your soul somewhere lives on. I’m not afraid of dying. Total peace after death, becoming someone else is the best hope I’ve got.

I grew up in the east side of Detroit in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. I never woke up saying, ‚I’m an orphan again today, isn’t this terrible? Poor me.‘

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

If we are hungry enough for God, we will find a way into His presence. We should be so hungry for the presence of God that we absolutely will not go out of our house or tackle any kind of project until we have spent some time with Him.