Thought of the Day

Today

“Treat a child as though he already is the person he’s capable of becoming.”—Haim Ginott

March 2024


“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.”—Jimi Hendrix


“The only wealth which you will keep forever is the wealth you have given away.”—Marcus Aurelius


“Talent and potential mean nothing if you can't consistently do things when you don't feel like doing them.”—Unknown


“Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”—Henry David Thoreau


“Great things are done when men and mountains meet.”—William Blake


“If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there.”—Yogi Berra


“If equal affection cannot be,
let the more loving one be me.”
—W. H. Auden


“God gives Himself to those who give themselves to Him.”—Thomas Merton


“Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another.”—Walter Elliott


“The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”—William James


“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”—George Bernard Shaw


“It is better to be faithful than famous.”—Teddy Roosevelt


“I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald


When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll—
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.
—H. G. Spafford


“Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience.”—George Washington


“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.”—Woodrow Wilson


“A true friend knows your weaknesses but shows you your strengths; feels your fears but fortifies your faith; sees your anxieties but frees your spirit; recognizes your disabilities but emphasizes your possibilities.”—William Arthur Ward

February 2024

“Luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. Opportunities parade past all of us all the time. The key is that you must be paying attention to see them, you must be willing to take risks, you must expose yourself to the possibility of massive failure and you must believe in what you are doing so much that you do it anyway.”—Richard Garriott


“The greatest thing that we can do is to help somebody know that they're loved and capable of loving.”—Fred Rogers


“The intensive care waiting room is different from any other place in the world. And the people who wait are different. They can’t do enough for each other. Each person pulls for everyone else. Vanity and pretense vanish. The universe is focused on the doctor’s next report. If only it will show improvement. Everyone knows that loving someone else is what life is all about. Could we learn to love like that if we realized that every day of life is a day in the waiting room?”—John Ortberg


“I think the most dangerous object in your home is … a back-reclining, deeply cushioned, foot-resting little death trap called an easy chair. What’s so dangerous about this chair is not the things you do while you’re in it. It’s the things you don’t do, the relationships you never deepen, the people in need you never serve—never even see. It’s the great prayers you never pray, noble thoughts you never think, adventures you never take. It’s the races you never run and the battles you never fight, the laughs you don’t laugh and the tears you don’t weep. You were made for something more than life in the chair. It may be the most dangerous object in your house.”—John Ortberg


“A happy life is not built up of tours abroad and pleasant holidays, but of little clumps of violets noticed by the roadside, hidden away almost so that only those can see them who have God’s peace and love in their hearts; in one long continuous chain of little joys, little whispers from the spiritual world, little gleams of sunshine on our daily walk.”—Edward Wilson


“What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?”—Jean Jacques Rousseau


“Make sure your worst enemy doesn’t live between your two ears.”—Laird Hamilton


“It is a hard rule of life, and I believe a healthy one, that no great plan is ever carried out without meeting and overcoming endless obstacles that come up to try the skill of man’s hand, the quality of his courage, and the endurance of his faith.”—Donald Douglas


“You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.”—Malcolm X


“There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned and oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.”—Will Durant


“To love what you do, and feel that it matters. How could anything else be more fun?”—Katharine Graham


“Obstacles don't have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don't turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.”—Michael Jordan


“Because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.”—Edward Everett Hale


“Anger is the feeling that makes your mouth work faster than your mind.”—Evan Esar


“May I never miss a sunset or a rainbow because I am looking down.”—Sara June Parker


“Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself, and all things possible.”—Thomas a Kempis


Life is real! life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal.
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


“The road to success is always under construction.”—Lily Tomlin


“Jesus came, he told us, not to destroy life but that we may have it more abundantly. Paradoxically, we get this abundant life in ways we may not have counted on. We get it by investing in others, by taking courageous stands for justice, by ministering to the weak and needy, by pursuing God and not self.”—Philip Yancey


“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”—C. S. Lewis


“Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.”—John C. Maxwell


“Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”—George Bernard Shaw


The wounds I might have healed,
The human sorrow and smart!
And yet it never was in my soul
To play so ill a part.
But evil is wrought by want of thought
As well as want of heart.
—Thomas Hood


“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.”—Helen Keller


“Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So . . . get on your way.”—Dr. Seuss


“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancements, you should include all things in your gratitude.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


Love much. There is no waste in freely giving;
More blessed is it, even, than to receive.
He who loves much, alone finds life worth living;
Love on, through doubt and darkness; and believe
There is nothing which Love may not achieve.
—Ella Wheeler Wilcox


“The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.”—Havelock Ellis


“One day I just woke up and realized that I can’t touch yesterday. So why the heck was I letting it touch me?”—Steve Maraboli

January 2024

I will not doubt though all my ships at sea
Come drifting home with broken masts and sails,
I will believe the Hand which never fails,
From seeming evil worketh good for me;
And though I weep because those sails are tattered,
Still will I cry, while my best hopes lie shattered,
“I trust in Thee.”


“You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“The older I get, the more I’m conscious of ways very small things can make a change in the world. Tiny little things, but the world is made up of tiny matters, isn’t it?”—Sandra Cisneros


"If faith were rational, it wouldn't be—by definition—faith. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark."—Elizabeth Gilbert


“No ray of sunlight is ever lost, but the green which it awakes into existence needs time to sprout, and it is not always granted to the sower to see the harvest. All work that is worth anything is done in faith.”—Albert Schweitzer


My Task

To love some one more dearly ev’ry day,
To help a wandering child to find his way,
To ponder o’er a noble thought, and pray,
And smile when evening falls.

To follow truth as blind men long for light,
To do my best from dawn of day till night,
To keep my heart fit for His holy sight,
And answer when He calls.

—Maude Louise Ray 

“Little by little, one travels far.”—J. R. R. Tolkien


“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand. … Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?”—Henry David Thoreau


“Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be!”—Miguel de Cervantes


“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”—George Orwell


Is the work difficult?
Jesus directs thee.
Is the path dangerous?
Jesus protects thee.
Fear not and falter not;
Let the word cheer thee:
All through the coming year
He will be near thee.


“Being considerate of others will take you further in life than any college or professional degree.”—Marian Wright Edelman


We must live through the weary winter

If we would value the spring;

And the woods must be cold and silent

Before the robins sing.

The flowers must lie buried in darkness

Before they can bud and bloom;

And the sweetest and warmest sunshine

Comes after the storm and gloom.

—Agnes L. Pratt 

“Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody expects of you. Never excuse yourself.”—Henry Ward Beecher


“A commonplace life,” we say, and we sigh;
But why should we sigh as we say?
The commonplace sun in the commonplace sky
Makes up the commonplace day.
The moon and the stars are commonplace things,
And the flower that blooms and the bird that sings,
But dark were the world and sad our lot
If the flowers failed and the sun shone not;
And God, who studies each separate soul
Out of commonplace lives makes his beautiful whole. 


“For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.”—John Ortberg


“You will succeed if you persevere, and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles, a delight in climbing rugged paths, which you would perhaps never know if you did not sometime slip backward.”—Helen Keller


You will find that luck
Is only pluck
To try things over and over;
Patience and skill,
Courage and will,
Are the four leaves of luck’s clover.


“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.”—Leo Buscaglia


A moment in the morning, ere the cares of day begin,
Ere the heart’s wide door is open for the world to enter in,
Ah, then, alone with Jesus, in the silence of the morn,
In heavenly sweet communion, let your joyful day be born.
In the quietude that blesses with a prelude of repose
Let your soul be soothed and softened, as the dew revives the rose.
—Unknown


“Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.”—C. S. Lewis


“You either get bitter or you get better. It’s that simple. You either take what has been dealt to you and allow it to make you a better person, or you allow it to tear you down. The choice does not belong to fate, it belongs to you.”—Josh Shipp


“Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.”—Vincent Van Gogh


“It will take guts to admit that you have behaved in a way that prevents you from being your better self, and then choose to act differently.”—Sidney Poitier


“You may delay, but time will not.”—Benjamin Franklin


“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”—Mother Teresa


“Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.”—Martin Luther King Jr.


“I always prefer to believe the best of everybody; it saves so much trouble.”—Rudyard Kipling


“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.”—Dr. Seuss


The future lies before you,
Like a field of driven snow;
Be careful how you tread it,
For every step will show.
—Author unknown


Another fresh new year is here …
Another year to live!
To banish worry, doubt, and fear,
To love and laugh and give!
This bright new year is given me
To live each day with zest …
To daily grow and try to be
My highest and my best!
—William Arthur Ward

December 2023

“Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past.”—Henry Ward Beecher


“There is no need to plead that the love of God shall fill our heart as though he were unwilling to fill us. He is willing as light is willing to flood a room that is opened to its brightness; willing as water is willing to flow into an emptied channel. Love is pressing round us on all sides like air. Cease to resist, and instantly love takes possession.”—Amy Carmichael


“Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.”—George Carlin


“Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still.”—Frederick William Faber


“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will themselves not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die.”—Daniel Burnham


When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.
—Howard Thurman


“Love came down at Christmas; love all lovely, love divine; love was born at Christmas, stars and angels gave the sign.”—Christina G. Rossetti


“It is Christmas in the heart that puts Christmas in the air.”—W.T. Ellis


“Once in our world, a stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world.”—C.S. Lewis


“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”—Charles Dickens in “A Christmas Carol”


“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard.”—Psalm 19:1–3


“Every man is the builder of a temple called his body.”—Henry David Thoreau


“The most successful people are those who are good at Plan B.”—James Yorke


“Every moment is a fresh beginning.”—T. S. Eliot


“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.”—Dale Carnegie


“We must look for the opportunity in every difficulty instead of being paralyzed at the thought of the difficulty in every opportunity.”—Walter E. Cole


“Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know Plato and Aristotle—Einstein’s theory—the second law of thermodynamics—you only need a heart full of grace; a soul generated by love.”—Martin Luther King Jr.


“The only way to worry about nothing is to pray about everything.”—Author unknown


“The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.”—Oscar Wilde


“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”—Charlie Munger


“The Christian thinks his weakness his greatest hindrance in the life and service of God: God tells us it that is the secret of strength and success. It is our weakness, heartily accepted and continually realized, that gives us our claim and access to the [power] of him who has said, ‘My strength is made perfect in weakness.’”—Andrew Murray


“Hearts are the strongest when they beat in response to noble ideals.”—Ralph Bunche


“When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.”—Helen Keller


“Procrastination is like a credit card: it’s a lot of fun until you get the bill.”—Christopher Parker


“A bend in the road is not the end of the road ... unless you fail to make the turn.”—Author Unknown


“Tears are often the telescope by which men see far into heaven.”—Henry Ward Beecher


“No man is really wise until he is kind and courteous.”—Charles Haas


“The illiterate of the future are not those that cannot read or write. They are those that can not learn, unlearn, relearn.”—Alvin Toffler


“Every evening, I turn worries over to God. He’s going to be up all night anyway.”—Mary C. Crowley


“My days of whining and complaining about others have come to an end. Nothing is easier than fault-finding. All it will do is discolor my personality so that none will want to associate with me. That was my old life. No more.”—Og Mandino


“What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.”—Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife, 1864

November 2023

“Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.”—Alan Turing


“Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”—Theodore Roosevelt


“I  am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”—Louisa May Alcott


“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“I wonder what would happen if we all agreed to read one of the Gospels until we came to a place that told us to do something, then went out to do it, and only after we had done it, began reading again? There are aspects of the Gospel that are puzzling and difficult to understand. But our problems are not centered around the things we don’t understand, but rather in the things we do understand, the things we could not possibly misunderstand. Our problem is not so much that we don’t know what we should do. We know perfectly well, but we don’t want to do it.”—Peter Marshall


“The best way to show that a stick is crooked is not to argue about it or to spend time denouncing it, but to lay a straight stick alongside it.”—Dwight L. Moody


“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”—John F. Kennedy


“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.”—Melody Beattie


“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”—Benjamin Franklin


“If someone looked at how you spent your time over the last year, would what they see as your priorities match what you see as your priorities?”—Unknown


However others act toward thee,
Act thou toward them as seemeth right;
And whatsoever others be,
Be thou the child of love and light.


“Bloom where you are planted.”—Mother Jones


Slightest actions often meet the sorest needs,
For the world wants daily little kindly deeds;
O, what care and sorrow you may help remove
With your song and courage, sympathy and love.
—Lanta W. Smith


“Faith is not logical. But it isn’t illogical either. Faith is theological. It does not ignore reality; it just adds God into the equation.”—Mark Batterson


“No individual has any right to come into the world and go out of it without leaving behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it.”—George Washington Carver


“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”—Albert Schweitzer


“Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.”—Baruch Spinoza


“The moment you wake up each morning, all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists in shoving it all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other, larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.”—C. S. Lewis


“One cannot help being old, but one can resist being aged.”—Lord Samuel


“When we hate our enemies, we are giving them power over us: power over our sleep, our appetites, our blood pressure, our health and our happiness. Our enemies would dance with joy if only they knew how they were worrying us, lacerating us, and getting even with us! Our hate is not hurting them at all, but our hate is turning our days and nights into a hellish turmoil.”—Dale Carnegie


“In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.”—Dietrich Bonhoeffer


“Anyone God uses significantly is always deeply wounded . . . We are, each and every one of us, insignificant people whom God has called and graced to use in a significant way . . . On the last day, Jesus will look us over not for medals, diplomas, or honors, but for scars.”—Brennan Manning


“He who stops being better stops being good.”—Oliver Cromwell


“Strong people don’t put others down … they lift them up.”—Michael P. Watson


“If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.”—Mother Teresa


“It is not physical beauty nor temporal glory nor the brightness of light dear to earthly eyes, nor the sweet melodies of all kinds of songs, nor the gentle odor of flowers, and ointments and perfumes, nor manna or honey, nor limbs welcoming the embraces of the flesh; it is not these I love when I love my God. Yet there is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God—a light, voice, odor, food, embrace of my innerness, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part. That is what I love when I love my God.”—Augustine


“If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?”—Stephen Levine


“Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.”—Sydney J. Harris


“The most important discovery you will ever make is the love the Father has for you. Your power in prayer will flow from the certainty that the One who made you likes you; he is not scowling at you, he is on your side.”—Pete Greig


“A good example is far better than a good precept.”—Dwight L. Moody

October 2023


“Never think that God’s delays are God’s denials. Hold on; hold fast; hold out. Patience is genius.”—Comte de Buffon


“A sign of character is the ability to learn from people you might not like.”—Farnam Street


“No man has ever risen to the real stature of spiritual manhood until he has found that it is finer to serve somebody else than it is to serve himself.”—Woodrow Wilson


“By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy—indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self-satisfaction”—William Osler


“Never give up on a dream because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.”—Earl Nightingale


“Beware in your prayers, above everything else, of limiting God, not only by unbelief, but by fancying that you know what He can do. Expect unexpected things ‘above all that we ask or think.’”—Andrew Murray


“It’s not what you gather, but what you scatter that tells what kind of life you have lived.”—Helen Walton


“Write your obituary and try to figure out how to live up to it.”—Warren Buffett


“A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.”—Thomas Carlyle


The Christian life is best lived dangerously. Playing it safe won't yield much fruit. People who risk friendships or jobs or, even worse, their own lives for the sake of the Gospel will get the most results. Living the faith well—"fighting the good fight"—requires strict discipline, self-denial, and a willingness to expose oneself to danger. This is where trust comes in. God may not deliver you from suffering right away, but he will sustain you and ultimately reward you. And the knowledge that you have risked all for his sake will exhilarate you.—Brad Locke


“Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.”—Og Mandino


“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain.”—Emily Dickinson


“You have a clean slate every day you wake up. You have a chance every single morning to make that change and be the person you want to be. You just have to decide to do it. Decide today’s the day.”—Brendon Burchard


“Prayer is not monologue, but dialogue. God's voice in response to mine is its most essential part.”—Andrew Murray


“Christ wants not nibblers of the possible, but grabbers of the impossible, by faith in the omnipotence, fidelity and wisdom of the Almighty Savior who gave the command. Is there a wall in our path? By our God we will leap over it! Are there lions and scorpions in our way? We will trample them under our feet! Does a mountain bar our way? Saying, ‘Be thou removed and cast into the sea,’ we will march on! Soldiers of Jesus, never surrender!”—C. T. Studd


“You can do anything, but not everything.”—David Allen


“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”—Antoine de Saint-Exupery


“All the water in all the oceans cannot sink a ship unless it gets inside. Nor can all the trouble in the world harm us unless it gets within us.”—Eugene Peterson


“Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway.”—John Wayne


“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.”—Dalai Lama


“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction....The chain reaction of evil—hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars—must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”—Martin Luther King, Jr.


“The law of an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”—Mohandas Gandhi


“War does not determine who is right, only who is left.”—Bertrand Russell


“The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands.”—Alexandra Penney


“There is a choice you have to make in everything you do. So keep in mind that in the end, the choice you make, makes you.”—John Wooden


“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”—Thomas H. Huxley


“If you’re not daring to believe God for the impossible, you’re sleeping through some of the best parts of the Christian life.”—Steven Furtick


“If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.”—Theodore Roosevelt


“Yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s games.”—Babe Ruth


“What kind of man would live where there is no daring? I don’t believe in taking foolish chances, but nothing can be accomplished without taking any chance at all.”—Charles A. Lindbergh


“God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say 'thank you'?”—William A. Ward

September 2023


“The great people of the earth today are the people who pray! I do not mean those who talk about prayer; nor those who say they believe in prayer; nor those who explain prayer; but I mean those who actually take the time to pray. They have not time. It must be taken from something else. That something else is important, very important and pressing, but still, less important and pressing than prayer.”—S.D. Gordon


“You will find yourself refreshed by the presence of cheerful people. Why not make earnest effort to confer that pleasure on others? Half the battle is gained if you never allow yourself to say anything gloomy.”—Lydia M. Child


“There is hunger for ordinary bread, and there is hunger for love, for kindness, for thoughtfulness; and this is the great poverty that makes people suffer so much.”—Mother Teresa


“There is no such thing in anyone’s life as an unimportant day.”—Alexander Woollcott


“Failure is just another way to learn how to do something right.”—Marian Wright Edelman


“Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of the colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change. Each time a person stands up for an idea, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, (s)he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”—Robert F. Kennedy


“The prayer power has never been tried to its full capacity. If we want to see mighty wonders of divine power and grace wrought in the place of weakness, failure and disappointment, let us answer God’s standing challenge, ‘Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things which thou knowest not!’”—J. Hudson Taylor


“You should not suffer the past. You should be able to wear it like a loose garment, take it off and let it drop.”—Eva Jessye


“Often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. We lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year’s time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worthwhile actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings.”—Andre Maurois


“I could not tread these perilous paths in safety, if I did not keep a saving sense of humor.”—Horatio Nelson


“Four things let us ever keep in mind: God hears prayer, God heeds prayer, God answers prayer, and God delivers by prayer.”—E. M. Bounds


“Our attitudes control our lives. Attitudes are a secret power working twenty-four hours a day, for good or bad. It is of paramount importance that we know how to harness and control this great force.”—Tom Blandi


“When you carry out acts of kindness you get a wonderful feeling inside. It is as though something inside your body responds and says, yes, this is how I ought to feel.”—Rabbi Harold Kushner


“I dwell in Possibility.”—Emily Dickinson


“Patience is also a form of action.”—Auguste Rodin


“Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters.”—Margaret Wheatley


“If you wouldn’t write it and sign it, don’t say it.”—Earl Wilson


“Always try to be a little kinder than is necessary.”—J.M. Barrie


“Falling down is how we grow. Staying down is how we die.”—Brian Vaszily


“God put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I am so far behind that I will never die.”—Humorist Bill Watterson


“Learn to hold loosely all that is not eternal.”—Maude Royden


“Often God demonstrates His faithfulness in adversity by providing for us what we need to survive. He does not change our painful circumstances. He sustains us through them.”—Charles Stanley


“To keep your marriage brimming, With love in the loving cup, Whenever you’re wrong, admit it; Whenever you’re right, shut up.”—Ogden Nash


“I am who I am today because of the choice I made yesterday.”—Eleanor Roosevelt


“The heart, like the grape, is prone to delivering its harvest in the same moment it appears to be crushed.”—Roger Houseden


“One way to get the most out of life is to look upon it as an adventure.”—William Feather


“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“Spread love everywhere you go; first of all in your house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next door neighbor. Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile.”—Mother Teresa


“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.”—H. Jackson Brown Jr.


“Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!”—Sir Walter Scott

August 2023


“We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.”—Charlie Chaplin


“Frequently people think compassion and love are merely sentimental. No! They are very demanding. If you are going to be compassionate, be prepared for action.”—Archbishop Desmond Tutu


“Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.”—Martin Luther King Jr.


“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross


“These are the times that try men’s souls. … Yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.”—Thomas Paine


“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”—Ernest Hemingway


“Imagination was given to us to compensate for what we are not; a sense of humor was given to us to console us for what we are.”—Mark McGinnis


“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”—Henry David Thoreau


“Without faith, nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible.”—Mary Bethune


“Refuse to be average. Let your heart soar as high as it will.”—A. W. Tozer


“If you hesitate to map out your future, to make a big plan or to set a goal, you’ve just gone ahead and mapped your future anyway.”—Seth Godin


“You’re never too old to be in love with what you do.”—Ray Bradbury


“When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.”—C. S. Lewis


“Conscience is that still, small voice that is sometimes too loud for comfort.”—Bert Murray


“It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.”—Moliere


“Do it now. It is not safe to leave a generous feeling to the cooling influences of the world.”—Thomas Guthrie


“Never mistake motion for action.”—Ernest Hemingway


“Maturity is the ability to do a job whether or not you are supervised, to carry money without spending it, and to bear an injustice without wanting to get even.”—Ann Landers


“Change is the essence of life."—Reinhold Niebuhr


“Life has many different chapters; one bad chapter doesn’t mean it’s the end of the book.”—Unknown


“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”—John F. Kennedy


“Rough diamonds may sometimes be mistaken for worthless pebbles.”—Thomas Browne


“Try to make at least one person happy every day. If you cannot do a kind deed, speak a kind word. If you cannot speak a kind word, think a kind thought. Count up, if you can, the treasure of happiness that you would dispense in a week, in a year, in a lifetime!”—Lawrence Lovasik


“The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.”—Jean-Paul Sartre


“For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.”—Audrey Hepburn


“The main lesson about prayer is just this: Do it! Do it! Do it! You want to be taught to pray. My answer is pray and never faint, and then you shall never fail.”—John Laidlaw


“It all comes to this: The simplest way to be happy is to do good.”—Helen Keller


“All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific."—Jane Wagner


“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies within us while we live.”—Norman Cousins


“Our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”—M. Scott Peck


“The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.”—Michelangelo

July 2023


“I will love you always. When this red hair is white, I will still love you. When the smooth softness of youth is replaced by the delicate softness of age, I will still want to touch your skin. When your face is full of the lines of every smile you have ever smiled, of every surprise I have seen flash through your eyes, when every tear you have ever cried has left its mark upon your face, I will treasure you all the more, because I was there to see it all."—Laurell K. Hamilton, A Lick of Frost


“We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world.”—Helen Keller


“One man can make a difference and every man should try.”—Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis


“Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.”—Oscar Ameringer


“If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it.”—Lucy Larcom


“Jesus said we'd know the extent of our love for God by how well we loved people.”—Bob Goff


“One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears, by listening to them.”—Dean Rusk


“You are surrounded by hundreds of people more timid than you are.”—Fred Barton


“Nothing is more important than to learn how to maintain a life of purpose in the midst of painful adversity.”—Tim Keller


“Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.”—Charles Swindoll


“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”—Martin Luther


“Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.”—George Sand


“In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.”—Kahlil Gibran


“You can’t do anything about the length of your life but you can do something about its width and depth.”—H. L. Mencken


“I always did something I was a little not ready to do. I think that’s how you grow. When there’s that moment of ‘Wow, I’m not really sure I can do this,’ and you push through those moments, that’s when you have a breakthrough.”—Marissa Mayer


“Go out into the world today and love the people you meet. Let your presence light new light in the hearts of people.”—Mother Teresa


“All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.”—James Russell Lowell


“Youth is not a period of time. It is a state of mind, a result of the will, a quality of the imagination, a victory of courage over timidity, of the taste for adventure over the love of comfort. A man doesn’t grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deserts his ideal. The years may wrinkle his skin, but deserting his ideal wrinkles his soul. Preoccupations, fears, doubts, and despair are the enemies which slowly bow us toward earth and turn us into dust before death. You will remain young as long as you are open to what is beautiful, good, and great; receptive to the messages of other men and women, of nature, and of God. If one day you should become bitter, pessimistic, and gnawed by despair, may God have mercy on your old man’s soul.”—Douglas MacArthur


“Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”—John F. Kennedy


“The problem with holding a grudge ... is that your hands are then too full to hold onto anything else. It might be the competition or a technology or the lousy things that someone did a decade ago. None of it is going to get better as a result of revisiting the grudge.”—Seth Godin


You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, non-apologetically, to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger “yes” burning inside. The enemy of the “best” is often the “good.”—Stephen Covey


“May we live here like strangers and make the world not a house, but an inn, in which we sup and lodge, expecting to be on our journey tomorrow.”—Charles Spurgeon


“If you can’t do great things, Mother Teresa used to say, do little things with great love. If you can’t do them with great love, do them with a little love. If you can’t do them with a little love, do them anyway.”—John Ortberg


“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“No matter how busy you are, you must take time to make the other person feel important.”—Mary Kay Ash


“True spirituality consists in living moment to moment by the grace of Jesus Christ.”—Francis Schaeffer


“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them with compassions, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”—Elizabeth Kubler-Ross


“Discipline is just choosing between what you want now and what you want most.”—Unknown


“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”—Leo Tolstoy


“We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old.”—Frederick Buechner


“Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good that it may prevail. I try to increase the power God has given me to see the best in everything and everyone and make that Best a part of my life.”—Helen Keller

June 2023


“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get—only with what you are expecting to give—which is everything.”—Katharine Hepburn


“A missionary does not necessarily go outside of his country, his state or even his own community. A true missionary needs only to go outside himself.”—Author unknown


“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”—John Steinbeck


"Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others, cannot keep it from themselves.”—Sir James M. Barrie


“I gave my life to be the person I am. Was it worth it?”—Richard Bach


“Contemporary people tend to examine the Bible, looking for things they can’t accept; but Christians should reverse that, allowing the Bible to examine us, looking for things God can’t accept.”—Tim Keller


“Nothing haunts us like the things we don’t say.”—Mitch Albom


“When it comes to life, the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.”—G. K. Chesterton


“Most of us see only a tiny fraction of the choices we have. What will you feed your mind? What thoughts will you dwell on? Whom will you have conversations with? Where will you direct your desires? How will you take care of your body? What acts of service will you engage in? When will you choose to be interrupted, and when will you choose to stay on task? What will you eat? How will you spend your time? All of these are calls you will make, and when you add them up, they create your life.”—John Ortberg


“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”―W. B. Yeats


"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see."—Henry David Thoreau


“Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.”—Benjamin Franklin


“God will either give us what we ask or give us what we would have asked if we knew everything he knows.”—Tim Keller


“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.”—Robin Williams


“Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don’t just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles.”—Tina Fey


“If you don’t like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less.”—Eric Shinseki


“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”—George Orwell


“It’s a shallow life that doesn’t give a person a few scars.”—Garrison Keillor


“All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.”—Albert Camus


“[These are] Christianity’s unsurpassed offers—a meaning that suffering cannot remove, a satisfaction not based on circumstances, a freedom that does not hurt but rather enhances love, an identity that does not crush you or exclude others, a moral compass that does not turn you into an oppressor, and a hope that can face anything, even death.”—Tim Keller


“Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary.”—Mother Teresa


“Sometimes you have to step outside of the person you’ve been, and remember the person you were meant to be, the person you wanted to be, the person you are.”—H. G. Wells


“Speak in such a way that others love to listen to you. Listen in such a way that others love to speak to you.”—Anonymous


“When Jesus Christ was in the garden of Gethsemane and the ultimate darkness was coming down on him and he knew it was coming, he didn’t abandon you; he died for you. If Jesus Christ didn’t abandon you in his darkness, the ultimate darkness, why would he abandon you now, in yours?”—Tim Keller


“The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.”—Martin Luther King, Jr.


“If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”—Mickey Mantle


May God bless you with discomfort
At easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships
So that you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger
At injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people,
So that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.
May God bless you with tears
To shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger and war,
So that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and
To turn their pain into joy.
And may God bless you with enough foolishness
To believe that you can make a difference in the world,
So that you can do what others claim cannot be done
To bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.
Amen.
      —A Franciscan benediction


“Imperfect action is better than perfect inaction.”—Harry Truman


“We must learn to honor excellence in every socially accepted human activity, however humble the activity, and to scorn shoddiness, however exalted the activity. An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”—John W. Gardner


“The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves.”—Amelia Earhart

May 2023


“A year from now you will wish you had started today.”—Karen Lamb


“Each minute we spend worrying about the future and regretting the past is a minute we miss in our appointment with life.”—Thich Nhat Hanh


“If you would hit the mark, you must aim a little above it; every arrow that flies feels the attraction of the earth.”—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


“The stuff in our lives is only temporary. The day is coming when all our 401(k)s and our bank statements will be irrelevant. The titles on our resumes will no longer impress anyone. GPAs and SAT scores and college acceptances will be long-forgotten. No one will know what clothes hung in our closets or what cars sat in our garages. All that will be left is love. That which was done out of love for God will last.”—John Ortberg


“Over every mountain there is a path, although it may not be seen from the valley.”—Theodore Roethke


“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.”—W. H. Auden


“There’s no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.”—Will Rogers


“To say ‘I know God forgives me, but I can’t forgive myself’ means you’ve failed an idol whose approval is more important than God’s.”—Tim Keller


“Everything that is worthwhile in life is scary. Choosing a school, choosing a career, getting married, having kids—all those things are scary. If it is not fearful, it is not worthwhile.”—Paul Tournier


“I’m looking forward to looking back on all this.”—Sandra Knell


“The gospel is that I am so sinful that Jesus had to die for me, yet so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. I can’t feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone.”—Tim Keller


“Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.”—Pearl S. Buck


“Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That’s why it’s a comfort to go hand in hand.”—Emily Kimbrough


“Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.”—Maimonides


“A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.”—Harry Truman


“The thing that lies at the foundation of positive change, the way I see it, is service to a fellow human being.”—Lee lacocca


“The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.”—Henry Ward Beecher


“Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy and change ordinary opportunities into blessings.”—William Arthur Ward


“We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.”—Mother Teresa


“All progress begins with a brave decision.”—Marie Forleo


“We must give more in order to get more. It is the generous giving of ourselves that produces the generous harvest.”—Orison Swett Marden


“Never think that God’s delays are God’s denials. Hold on; hold fast; hold out. Patience is genius.”—Comte de Buffon


“Speed is only useful if you’re running in the right direction.”—Unknown


“Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.”—Fred Astaire


“How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.”—William Shakespeare


“A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.”—Jessamyn West


“A bad attitude is like a flat tire; you can’t go anywhere until you change it.”—Unknown


“It is not sacrifice if you love what you’re doing.”—Mia Hamm


“Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses.”—Ann Landers


“Joy is the serious business of heaven.”—C. S. Lewis


“Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty. It merely moves from their faces to their hearts.”—Martin Buxbaum

April 2023


“It is unlikely that we will deepen our relationship with God in a casual or haphazard manner. There will be a need for some intentional commitment and some reorganization in our own lives. But there is nothing that will enrich our lives more than a deeper and clearer perception of God’s presence in the routine of daily living.”—William Paulsell


“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.”—Eleanor Roosevelt


“What greater bliss than to look back on days spent in usefulness, in doing good to those around us.”—Dorothea Dix


“Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast.”—William Shakespeare


“The great danger is not that we will renounce our faith, but settle for a mediocre version of it.”—John Ortberg


“What you dislike in another, take care to correct in yourself.”—Thomas Sprat


“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”—D. L. Moody


“People nowadays take time far more seriously than eternity.”—Thomas Kelly


Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening “Do it again” to the moon. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.—G. K. Chesterton


“Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.”—Robert F. Kennedy


“Anything God has ever done, he can do now. Anything God has ever done anywhere, he can do here. Anything God has ever done for anyone, he can do for you.”—A. W. Tozer


“Never mistake motion for action.”—Ernest Hemingway


“To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”—Nelson Mandela


“The most difficult thing I have ever had to do is follow the guidance I prayed for.”—Albert Schweitzer


“To praise is an investment in happiness.”—George Adams


“In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”—Eric Hoffer


“I thank You God for most this amazing day; for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes.”—e.e. cummings


“If you don’t leave your past in the past, it will destroy your future. Live for what today has to offer, not for what yesterday has taken away.”—Unknown


“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross


“I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.”—John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent


“Stress makes you believe that everything has to happen right now. Faith reassures you that everything will happen in God’s timing.”—Unknown


Saviour, who died for me,
I give myself to thee;
Thy love, so full, so free,
Claims all my powers.
Be this my purpose high,
To serve Thee till I die,
Whether my path shall lie
‘Mid thorns or flowers.

Saviour, with me abide;
Be ever near my side;
Support, defend, and guide.
I look to thee.
I lay my hand in thine,
And fleeting joys resign,
If I may call thee mine
Eternally.
—Mary J. Mason

“We ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work but the love with which it is performed.”—Brother Lawrence


"By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong."—Charles Wadsworth


“I do not understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are, but does not leave us where it found us.”—Anne Lamott


“If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you’ve got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One needs to learn the difference.”—Robert Fulghum


“Being considerate of others will take you further in life than any college or professional degree.”—Marian Wright Edelman


“Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.”—John Lennon


“Faith is to believe what we do not see, and the reward of this faith is to see what we believe.”—St. Augustine


“Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.”—James Bovard

March 2023


“The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.”—Robert Frost


“One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was: go slow to go fast. We live as though there aren’t enough hours in the day but if we do each thing calmly and carefully we will get it done quicker and with much less stress.”—Viggo Mortensen


“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”—Albert Einstein


“A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.”—John Neal


“It’s like, at the end, there’s this surprise quiz: Am I proud of me? I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth what I paid?”—Richard Bach


Sometimes a light surprises the Christian as he sings;
It is the Lord who rises, with healing in his wings:
When comforts are declining, He grants the soul again
A season of clear shining, to cheer it after rain.
In holy contemplation we sweetly then pursue
The theme of God’s salvation, and find it ever new.
Set free from present sorrow, we cheerfully can say,
Let the unknown tomorrow bring with it what it may.
—William Cowper


“The intellect of the wise is like glass: It admits the light of heaven and reflects it.”—Augustus Hare


“Everyone has a plan, till they get punched in the mouth.”—Mike Tyson


“A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise.”―A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh


“Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.”—Stephen Covey


“There is not enough darkness in all the world to put out the light of even one candle.”—Robert Alden


“Who does not grow, declines.”—Rabbi Hillel


“Decision decides destiny. What God wants you to become is the positive person you decide to become when led by God’s spirit.”—Israelmore Ayivor


“The world breaks us all. Afterward, some are stronger at the broken places.”—Ernest Hemingway


“Language is the apparel in which your thoughts parade in public. Never clothe them in vulgar and shoddy attire.”—George W. Crane


"You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you."—John Bunyan


"Act like what you do makes a difference. It does."—Henry James


“Happiness can be found in even the darkest of times, if only one remembers to turn on the light.”—Steve Kloves


“Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one’s belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one’s right to believe, and obey, his own conscience.”—Viktor Frankl


“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.”—Henry van Dyke


“Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun.”—Christina Rossetti


“Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.”—Karl Barth


“Opportunity is not always at an opportune time.”—Diane Hendricks


“Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys and dividing our grief.”—Marcus Tullius Cicero


“You cannot have a positive life and a negative mind.”—Joyce Meyer


“I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.”—Charlotte Bronte


“You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.”—Alan Watts


“There is a calmness to a life lived in gratitude, a quiet joy.”—Ralph Blum


“The biggest generator of long-term results is learning to do things when you don't feel like doing them. If you let excuses or emotion drive behavior, you're cheating your future self. Put aside the excuses and start doing what you need to do.”—Farnam Street


“Just knowing you don't have the answers is a recipe for humility, openness, acceptance, forgiveness, and an eagerness to learn—and those are all good things.”—Dick Van Dyke


“What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made in the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.”—Nelson Mandela

February 2023


“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”—Henry David Thoreau


“People forget years and remember moments.”—Ann Beattie


The little sharp vexations
And the briars that cut the feet,
Why not take all to the Helper
Who has never failed us yet?
Tell him about the heartache,
And tell him the longings too,
Tell him the baffled purpose
When we scarce know what to do.
Then, leaving all our weakness
With the One divinely strong,
Forget that we bore the burden
And carry away the song.
—Phillips Brooks


“Progress everywhere today does seem to come so very heavily disguised as chaos.”—Joyce Grenfell


“Who, being loved, is poor?”—Oscar Wilde


“We are more fulfilled when we are involved in something bigger than ourselves.”—John Glenn


“We cannot become what we want by remaining what we are.”—Max Depree


“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a Butterfly.”—Richard Bach


“Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”—Leo Tolstoy


“Everyone has an invisible sign hanging from their neck saying, ‘Make me feel important.’ Never forget this message when working with people.”—Mary Kay Ash


“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.”—Jonathan Swift


“The greatness of a man’s power is in the measure of his surrender.”—William Booth


“A bell is no bell ‘til you ring it, a song is no song ‘til you sing it. And love in your heart wasn’t put there to stay. Love isn’t love ‘til you give it away.”—Oscar Hammerstein II from “Sound of Music”


“When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability. To be alive is to be vulnerable.”—Madeleine L’Engle


“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”―Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird


“Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”—Samuel Butler


The world is full of beauty,
As other worlds above;
And if we did our duty
It might be full of love.
—Gerald Massey


“You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things so that all the small things go in the right direction.”—Alvin Toffler


“Faith goes up the stairs that love has built and looks out the window which hope has opened.”—Charles Spurgeon


“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”—John Wooden


“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples.”—Mother Teresa


However others act toward thee,
Act thou toward them as seemeth right;
And whatsoever others be,
Be thou the child of love and light.—Author unknown


“It’ll be a great day when education gets all the money it wants and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers.”—Author unknown


“It has always seemed strange to me... The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.”—John Steinbeck, Cannery Row


“The most important person is the one you are with in this moment.”—Leo Tolstoy


“Courage does not always roar. Sometimes, it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, I will try again tomorrow.”—Maryanne Radanbacher


“And even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand before the Lord of Song, with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah…”—Leonard Cohen


“In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.”—Paul Harvey

January 2023

“The virtue of man ought to be measured, not by his extraordinary exertions, but by his everyday conduct.”—Blaise Pascal


“Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively; unless you can choose a challenge instead of competence.”—Eleanor Roosevelt


“I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.”—Mother Teresa


“In youth we learn; in age we understand.”—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbac


“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.”—Alan Alda


“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”—Winston Churchill


“If you don’t like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less.”—Eric Shinseki


“Age wrinkles the body. Quitting wrinkles the soul.”—General Douglas MacArthur


“Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, or worn. It is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.”—Denis Waitley


“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”—C. S. Lewis


“Never esteem anything as an advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.”—Marcus Aurelius


“The mark of the educated man is not in his boast that he has built his mountain of facts and stood on the top of it, but in his admission that there may be other peaks in the same range with men on the top of them, and that, though their views of the landscape may be different from his, they are nonetheless legitimate.”—E. J. Pratt


“Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.”—Helen Keller


“Worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe.”—Mark Twain


“All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single world: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope.”—Winston Churchill


“I challenge you to make your life a masterpiece. I challenge you to join the ranks of people who live what they teach, who walk their talk.”—Tony Robbins


“Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within the reach of every hand.”—Mother Teresa


“I place no value on anything I possess, except in relation to the Kingdom of God.”—David Livingstone


“Today’s mighty oak is just yesterday’s nut that held its ground.”—Unknown


“Do not be concerned that no one recognizes your merits; be concerned that you may not recognize others’.”—Confucius


“A river cuts through a rock not because of its power but its persistence.”—Jim Watkins


“If you wait until you're motivated, you’ve already lost. Surgeons don’t always feel like doing surgery. Teachers don’t always feel like teaching. Parents don’t always feel like cooking. Firemen don’t always feel like rushing into a burning building. If you let motivation dictate your actions, inertia conspires to keep you in place. Action creates progress. Progress creates momentum. Momentum creates motivation.”—Farnam Street


“One day or day one. You decide.”—Unknown


“Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance. It is laying hold of His willingness.”—Martin Luther


“Life is too short to nurse one’s misery. Hurry across the lowlands, that you may spend more time on the mountaintops.”—Phillips Brooks


“Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved.”—D. H. Lawrence


“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.”—Benjamin Franklin


“If your job is to eat a frog, eat it first thing in the morning, and if your job is to eat two frogs, eat the big one first.”—Mark Twain


“One day, you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted. Do it now.”—Paulo Coelho


When the carols have been stilled,
When the star-topped tree is taken down,
When family and friends are gone home,
When we are back to our schedules
The work of Christmas begins:
To welcome the refugee,
To heal a broken planet,
To feed the hungry,
To build bridges of trust,
Not walls of fear,
To share our gifts,
To seek justice and peace for all people.
—Michael Dougherty


“Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.”—Pope John XXIII

December 2022

“As the year comes to a close, it is a time for reflection—a time to release old thoughts and beliefs and forgive old hurts. Whatever has happened in the past year, the New Year brings fresh beginnings. Exciting new experiences and relationships await. Let us be thankful for the blessings of the past and the promise of the future.”—Peggy Toney Horton


“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”—Les Brown


“No amount of regret changes the past. No amount of anxiety changes the future. But any amount of gratitude changes the present.”—Marc and Angel Chernoff


“Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”—Helen Keller


“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“It all matters. That someone turns out the lamp, picks up the windblown wrapper, says hello to the invalid, pays at the unattended lot, listens to the repeated tale, folds the abandoned laundry, plays the game fairly, tells the story honestly, acknowledges help, gives credit, says good night, resists temptation, wipes the counter, waits at the yellow, makes the bed, tips the maid, remembers the illness, congratulates the victor, accepts the consequences, takes a stand, steps up, offers a hand, goes first, goes last, chooses the small portion, teaches the child, tends to the dying, comforts the grieving, removes the splinter, wipes the tear, directs the lost, touches the lonely, is the whole thing. What is most beautiful is least acknowledged. What is worth dying for is barely noticed.”—Laura McBride


“I am wishing for you this day a happy Christmas. I would send you those gifts which are beyond price, outlast time and bridge all space. I wish you all laughter and pure joy, a merry heart and a clear conscience, and love which thinks no evil, is not easily provoked, and seeks not its own; the fragrance of flowers, the sweet associations of holly and mistletoe and fir, the memory of deep woods, of peaceful hills, and of the mantling snow, which guards the sleep of all God’s creatures. I wish that the spirit of Christmas­tide may draw you into companionship with Him who giveth all. Come, let us adore Him.”—Bishop Remington


“What is Christmas? It is tenderness for the past, courage for the present, hope for the future. It is a fervent wish that every cup may overflow with blessings rich and eternal, and that every path may lead to peace.”—Agnes M. Pahro


“Christmas gives us the opportunity to pause and reflect on the important things around us—a time when we can look back on the year that has passed and prepare for the year ahead.”—David Cameron


“May the humility of the shepherds, the perseverance of the wise men, the joy of the angels, and the peace of the Christ Child be God’s gifts to you and yours this Christmastime and always.”—Traditional Moravian blessing


“Life is short. Be swift to love! Make haste to be kind!”—Henri Frederic Amiel


“There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.”—Blaise Pascal


“Live so that when your children think of fairness, caring, and integrity, they think of you.”—H. Jackson Brown Jr.


“The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”—William James


“History is a vast early warning system.”—Norman Cousins


“What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?”—Jean Jacques Rousseau


“Forever is composed of nows.”—Emily Dickinson


“One filled with joy preaches without preaching.”—Mother Teresa


“Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes but when you look back everything is different.”—C. S. Lewis


“Great things are done when men and mountains meet.”—William Blake


“Love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved. Those who think they can love only the people they prefer do not love at all. Love discovers truths about individuals that others cannot see.”—Søren Kierkegaard


“Faith is not logical. But it isn’t illogical either. Faith is theological. It does not ignore reality; it just adds God into the equation.”—Mark Batterson


“Nine requisites for contented living: Health enough to make work a pleasure. Wealth enough to support your needs. Strength to battle with difficulties and overcome them. Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them. Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished. Charity enough to see some good in your neighbor. Love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others. Faith enough to make real the things of God. Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.”—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”—Jesus, Mark 8:36


“Would the boy you were be proud of the man you are?”—Laurence J. Peter


“There is nothing wrong with making mistakes. Just don’t respond with encores.”—Author unknown


“Listening is not merely not talking, though even that is beyond most of our powers; it means taking a vigorous, human interest in what is being told us. You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer.”—Alice Duer Miller


“This is the true joy of life: the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clot of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”—George Bernard Shaw


“Our worst fault is our preoccupation with the faults of others.”—Kahlil Gibran


“In the absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.”—Robert Heinlein


“Life will only change when you become more committed to your dreams than you are to your comfort zone.”—Billy Cox

November 2022

“Faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”—Martin Luther King Jr.


“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”—Charles Dickens


“I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday—or some previous day.”—Harvey Spencer Lewis


“If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there.”—Yogi Berra


“Never say no to adventures. Always say yes. Otherwise you will lead a very dull life.”—Ian Fleming


“Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.”—Stephen Leacock


“You simply will not be the same person two months from now after consciously giving thanks each day for the abundance that exists in your life. And you will have set in motion an ancient spiritual law: the more you have and are grateful for, the more will be given you.”—Sarah Ban Breathnack


“Make sure your worst enemy doesn’t live between your two ears.”—Laird Hamilton


“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.”—Woodrow Wilson


“It is a hard rule of life, and I believe a healthy one, that no great plan is ever carried out without meeting and overcoming endless obstacles that come up to try the skill of man’s hand, the quality of his courage, and the endurance of his faith.”—Donald Douglas


“Joy is the flag you fly when the Prince of Peace is in residence within your heart.”—Wilferd Peterson


“Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don’t.”—Pete Seeger


“It ought to be the business of every day to prepare for our final day.”—Attributed to Matthew Henry


“The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.”—Havelock Ellis


“When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.”—Helen Keller


“Conscience is that still, small voice that is sometimes too loud for comfort.”—Bert Murray


“You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.”—Malcolm X


“Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know Plato and Aristotle—Einstein’s theory—the second law of thermodynamics—you only need a heart full of grace; a soul generated by love.”—Martin Luther King Jr.


“Heaven is full of answers to prayer for which no one bothered to ask.”—Billy Graham


“Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain—and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.”—Dale Carnegie


“A life that doesn’t include hard-won accomplishment and triumph over obstacles may not be a satisfying one. There is something deeply fulfilling—even thrilling—in doing almost anything difficult extremely well. There is a joy and pride that come from pushing yourself to another level or across a new frontier. A life devoted only to the present—to feeling good in the now—is unlikely to deliver real fulfillment. The present moment by itself it too small, too hollow. We all need a future. Something beyond and greater than our own present gratification, at which to aim or feel we’ve contributed.”—The Triple Package


“Many times, when I was having a hard time with one of my children, God would always remind me that He was having a harder time with me than I was with them.”—Charlie “Tremendous” Jones


“Remember this your lifetime through: Tomorrow there will be more to do. And failure waits for all who stay with some success made yesterday. Tomorrow you must try once more, and even harder than before.”—John Wooden


“To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.”—Winston Churchill


“People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa.… I never made a sacrifice. We ought not to talk of ‘sacrifice’ when we remember the great sacrifice which He made who left His Father’s throne on high to give Himself for us.”—David Livingstone


“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”—Mark Twain


“I think high self-esteem is overrated. A little low self-esteem is actually quite good. … Maybe you're not the best, so you should work a little harder.”—Jay Leno


“Stewardship is the act of organizing your life so God can spend you.”—Lynn Miller


“Comfort zones are most often expanded through discomfort.”—Peter McWilliams


“Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself, and all things possible.”—Thomas a Kempis

October 2022

“Don’t forget to tell these special people in your life just how special they are to you.”—Bob Ross


“May I never miss a sunset or a rainbow because I am looking down.”—Sara June Parker


Life is real! life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal.
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
    —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


“Always do your very best. Even when no one else is looking, you always are. Don't disappoint yourself.”—Colin Powell


“Vision is not enough; it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps; we must step up the stairs.”—Václav Havel


O God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need for further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still. Show me Thy glory, I pray Thee, so that I may know Thee indeed. Begin in mercy a new work of love within me. Say to my soul, “Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away.” Then give me grace to rise and follow Thee up from this misty lowland where I have wandered so long.—A. W. Tozer


“One lesson I’ve learned is that if the job I do were easy, I wouldn’t derive so much satisfaction from it. The thrill of winning is in direct proportion to the effort I put in before. I also know, from long experience, that if you make an effort in training when you don’t especially feel like making it, the payoff is that you will win games when you are not feeling your best. That is how you win championships, that is what separates the great player from the merely good player. The difference lies in how well you’ve prepared.”—Rafael Nadal


“If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.”—C. S. Lewis


“Talk not of wasted affection; affection never was wasted.”—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


“We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise, we harden.”—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“A positive attitude from you tends to produce a positive attitude toward you.”—Deborah Day


“Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be!”—Miguel de Cervantes


“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.”—Kurt Vonnegut


Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.—George Bernard Shaw


“The road to success is always under construction.”—Lily Tomlin


“When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So, what the hell, leap.”—Cynthia Heimel


“We shall have all eternity to celebrate the victories, but we have only the few hours before sunset in which to win them.”—Amy Carmichael


“There is joy in self-forgetfulness. So I try to make the light in others' eyes my sun, the music in others' ears my symphony, the smile on others' lips my happiness.”—Helen Keller


“The older I get, the more I’m conscious of ways very small things can make a change in the world. Tiny little things, but the world is made up of tiny matters, isn’t it?”—Sandra Cisneros


“One day I just woke up and realized that I can’t touch yesterday. So why the heck was I letting it touch me?”—Steve Maraboli


“No ray of sunlight is ever lost, but the green which it awakes into existence needs time to sprout, and it is not always granted to the sower to see the harvest. All work that is worth anything is done in faith.”—Albert Schweitzer


“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.”—Henri Bergson


“To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals—that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.”—Honore De Balzac


“Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.”—Seneca


“Labels are for the things men make, not for men. The most primitive man is too complex to be labeled.”—Rex Stout


Love much. There is no waste in freely giving;
More blessed is it, even, than to receive.
He who loves much, alone finds life worth living;
Love on, through doubt and darkness; and believe
There is nothing which Love may not achieve.
    —Ella Wheeler Wilcox


“You will succeed if you persevere, and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles, a delight in climbing rugged paths, which you would perhaps never know if you did not sometime slip backward.”—Helen Keller


“Prudence considers the means of acquiring happiness, but wisdom considers the very object of happiness.”—St. Thomas Aquinas


“In the Bible, Jesus said that our words are an overflow of whatever is in our hearts, … and those words tend to show others what’s happening beneath the surface in our lives. Do the words you use show a heart full of grace, love, and acceptance or one of disapproval, condemnation, and vitriol?”—Bob Goff


“You either get bitter or you get better. It’s that simple. You either take what has been dealt to you and allow it to make you a better person, or you allow it to tear you down. The choice does not belong to fate, it belongs to you.”—Josh Shipp


“The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today’s work superbly well.”—William Osler

September 2022

“It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honorably.”—Immanuel Kant


“To love what you do, and feel that it matters. How could anything else be more fun?”—Katharine Graham


“I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.”—Charlotte Bronte


“If my life is fruitless, it doesn’t matter who praises me, and if my life is fruitful, it doesn’t matter who criticizes me.”—John Bunyan


“Most of the world’s work is done by people who don’t feel very well.”—Winston Churchill


“All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”—Yogi Berra


“There is nothing permanent except change.”—Heraclitus


“All things are difficult before they are easy.”—Dr. Thomas Fuller


“The course of human history consists of a series of encounters ... in which each man or woman or child ... is challenged by God to make [the] free choice between doing God’s will and refusing to do it. When Man refuses, he is free to make his refusal and to take the consequences.”—Arnold Toynbee


“A compliment is a gift, not to be thrown away carelessly, unless you want to hurt the giver.”—Eleanor Hamilton


“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”—Melody Beattie


“The only thing I know that truly heals people is unconditional love.”—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross


“The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.”—Will Rogers


“The purpose of life is a life of purpose.”—Robert Byrne


“Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.”—Sir Winston Churchill


“My course is set for an uncharted sea.”—Dante Alighieri


“Hope has two beautiful daughters: their names are anger and courage. Anger that things are the way they are. Courage to make them the way they ought to be.”—St. Augustine


“When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. And when life is bitter, say thank you and grow.”—Shauna Niequist


“We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is the pain of discipline weighs ounces while the pain of regret weighs tons.”—Jim Rohn


There is no such thing as a “self-made” man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our success.—George Burton Adams


“When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?”—Eleanor Roosevelt


“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people; to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole.”—Lauren Oliver


“Everybody has difficult years, but a lot of times the difficult years end up being the greatest years of your whole entire life, if you survive them.”—Brittany Murphy


“Don’t cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.”—Unknown


“If you haven’t got any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.”—Bob Hope


“There’s no shame in failing. The only shame is not giving things your best shot.”—Robin Williams


“Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.”—Erich Fromm


“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”—George Orwell


“Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly, as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to face many a danger, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.”—Annie Besant

August 2022


“Do not ask the Lord to guide your footsteps, if you are not willing to move your feet.”—Author Unknown


“If you make it plain you like people, it’s hard for them to resist liking you back.”—Lois McMaster Bujold


“No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.”—Helen Keller


“Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in the senate.”—Orson Welles


“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”—Alan Watts


“It does good also to take walks out of doors, that our spirits may be raised and refreshed by the open air and fresh breeze.”—Seneca


“There is no evidence to suggest that anyone ever asked a prophet home for supper more than once.”—Frederick Buechner


“Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only a part of the first.”—Anna Quindlen


“Most of us tend to suffer from ‘agenda anxiety,’ the feeling that what we want to say to others is more important than what we think they might want to say to us.”—Nido Qubein


“Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.”—Thomas Merton


“I want to live in a world where people become famous because of their work for peace and justice and care. I want the famous to be inspiring; their lives an example of what every human being has it in them to do—act from love!”—Patch Adams


“A man can do only what a man can do. But if he does that each day, he can sleep at night and do it again the next day.”—Albert Schweitzer


“Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still.”—Frederick William Faber


“No man is really wise until he is kind and courteous.”—Charles Haas


“Be practical as well as generous in your ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars, but remember to keep your feet on the ground.”—Theodore Roosevelt


“Every man is the builder of a temple called his body.”—Henry David Thoreau


“This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”—Franklin D. Roosevelt


“I wonder what would happen if we all agreed to read one of the Gospels until we came to a place that told us to do something, then went out to do it, and only after we had done it, began reading again? There are aspects of the Gospel that are puzzling and difficult to understand. But our problems are not centered around the things we don’t understand, but rather in the things we do understand, the things we could not possibly misunderstand. Our problem is not so much that we don’t know what we should do. We know perfectly well, but we don’t want to do it.”—Peter Marshall


“Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the human spirit is colored by such impressions.”—Marcus Aurelius


“Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an oyster.”—Theodore Roosevelt


“The secret of change is to focus all your energy not on fighting the old but on building the new.”—Socrates


“Things don’t go wrong and break your heart so you can become bitter and give up. They happen to break you down and build you up so you can be all that you were intended to be.”—Charles “Tremendous” Jones


“Talent is a gift, but character is a choice.”—John C. Maxwell


“We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.”—General Omar Bradley


“Faith is knowing there is an ocean because you have seen a brook.”—William Arthur Ward


“Love will find a way. Indifference will find an excuse.”—Author unknown


“A well-developed sense of humor is the pole that adds balance to your steps as you walk the tightrope of life.”—William Arthur Ward


“The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.”—Francis Maitland Balfour


“To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves.”—Will Durant


“Jesus Christ is the only beginning and end of all my divine cogitations, day and night, yet I find and freely confess that I have attained but only a small and weak beginning of the height, depth, and breadth of this immeasurable, incomprehensible, and endless wisdom, and have scarce got and brought to light a few fragments out of this most deep and precious profundity.”—Martin Luther


“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.”—Helen Keller

July 2022

“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get—only with what you are expecting to give—which is everything.”—Katharine Hepburn


“Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.”—Alan Kay


“God of our life, there are days when the burdens we carry chafe our shoulders and weigh us down; when the road seems dreary and endless, the skies gray and threatening; when our lives have no music in them, and our hearts are lonely, and our souls have lost their courage. Flood the path with light, run our eyes to where the skies are full of promise; tune our hearts to brave music; give us the sense of community with heroes and saints of every age; and so quicken our spirits that we may be able to encourage the souls of all who journey with us on the road of life, to Your honor and glory.”—St. Augustine


“Lead the life that will make you kindly and friendly to everyone about you, and you will be surprised what a happy life you will lead.”—Charles M. Schwab


“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”—Isaac Newton


“The course of human history consists of a series of encounters ... in which each man or woman or child ... is challenged by God to make [the] free choice between doing God’s will and refusing to do it. When Man refuses, he is free to make his refusal and to take the consequences.”—Arnold Joseph Toynbee


“Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy those are who already possess it.”—Francois de La Rochefoucauld


“The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.”—George Eliot


“I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere that I needed to be.”—Douglas Adams


“Love is a medicine for the sickness of the world; a prescription often given, too rarely taken.”—Karl A. Menninger


“The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live.”—Joan Borysenko


“He who would travel happily must travel light.”—Antoine de Saint-Exupery


“Four little words sum up what has lifted most successful individuals above the crowd: a little bit more. They did all that was expected of them and a little bit more.”—A. Lou Vickery


“Reality is the leading cause of stress for those in touch with it.”—Lily Tomlin


“Make one person happy each day and in 40 years you will have made 14,600 human beings happy for a little time at least.”—Charley Willey


“Most time is wasted, not in hours, but in minutes. A bucket with a small hole in the bottom gets just as empty as a bucket that is deliberately emptied.”—Paul J. Meyer


“Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.”—Samuel Ullman


“Nowadays people are born to find fault. When they look at Achilles, they see only his heel.”--Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach


“When the politicians complain that TV turns the proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained.”—Edward R. Murrow


“The information we consume matters just as much as the food we put in our body. It affects our thinking, our behavior, how we understand our place in the world. And how we understand others.”--Evan Williams


“You would not think any duty small if you yourself were great.”—George MacDonald


“We are still in the position of waking up and having a choice. Do I make the world better today somehow, or do I not bother?”—Tom Hanks


“All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.”--Mitch Albom


“Courage is not limited to the battlefield or the Indianapolis 500 or bravely catching a thief in your house. The real tests of courage are much quieter. They are the inner tests, like remaining faithful when nobody’s looking, like enduring pain when the room is empty, like standing alone when you’re misunderstood.”—Charles Swindoll


“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”—Martin Luther


“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”—Frederick Douglass


“Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter, so the world will at least be a little bit different for our having passed through it.”—Rabbi Harold Kushner


“There are no such things as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.”—Scott Adams


“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”--Gilbert K. Chesterton


“Everyday courage has few witnesses. But yours is no less noble because no drum beats before you and no crowds shout your name.”—Robert Louis Stevenson


“The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.”—P. D. James

June 2022

“Value those people who tell you the truth, not just those people who tell you what you want to hear.”—Pat Summitt


“I never lie down at night without reflecting that—young as I am—I may not live to see another day.”—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart


“It all comes to this: The simplest way to be happy is to do good.”—Helen Keller


“Quarrels would not last long if the fault were only on one side.”—Francois de La Rochefoucauld


“Kindness is showing someone they matter.”—Unknown


“Money has never made man happy, nor will it, there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more of it one has, the more one wants.”—Benjamin Franklin


“Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“It’s a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand.”—Madeleine L’engle


“Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; Some blunders and absurdities crept in; Forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“A bend in the road is not the end of the road unless you fail to make the turn.”—Unknown


“Persistent love—like the dripping of water on a rock—can wear away a person’s resistance. It’s nearly impossible to stay angry with or emotionally distant from someone who unconditionally loves you.”—Gary Smalley


“All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.”—Winston Churchill


“Just as a small fire is extinguished by the storm whereas a large fire is enhanced by it—likewise a weak faith is weakened by predicament and catastrophes, whereas a strong faith is strengthened by them.”—Viktor E. Frankl


“Great opportunities to help others seldom come, but small ones surround us every day.”—Sally Koch


"I will keep constant watch over myself and—most usefully—will put each day up for review... Let us balance life’s books each day.”—Seneca


“No matter what people tell you, words and ideas can change the world.”—Robin Williams


“Joy is prayer—Joy is strength—Joy is love—Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.”—Mother Teresa


“We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.”—Jimmy Carter


“God doesn’t require us to succeed; he only requires that you try.”—Mother Teresa


“There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.”—Richard Feynman


“Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you invest, investigate. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try. Before you retire, save. Before you die, give.”—William A. Ward


Slightest actions often meet the sorest needs,
For the world wants daily little kindly deeds;
O, what care and sorrow you may help remove
With your song and courage, sympathy and love.
—Lanta W. Smith


“How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.”—John Burroughs


“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”—Winston Churchill


“At the center of the universe is a loving heart that continues to beat and that wants the best for every person. Anything we can do to help foster the intellect and spirit and emotional growth of our fellow human beings, that is our job. Those of us who have this particular vision must continue against all odds. Life is for service.”—Fred Rogers


“How God works in answer to prayer is a mystery that logic cannot penetrate, but that He does work in answer to prayer is gloriously true.”—Oswald Chambers


“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”—George Bernard Shaw


“All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field.”—Albert Einstein


“The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year.”—John Foster Dulles


“Treat everyone you meet as though they’re the most important person you’ll meet that day.”—Roger Dawson

May 2022

It was only a sunny smile,
and little it cost in the giving,
but like morning light,
it scattered the night,
and made the day worth living.
  —F. Scott Fitzgerald


“As I came down from the mountain, I recalled how, not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it’s often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources—it’s a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources.”—Pico Iyer


“Be more concerned about making others feel good about themselves than you are making them feel good about you.”—John C. Maxwell


“How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life?”—Charles Lindbergh


“Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use, [and] nothing is less important than which fork you use.”—Emily Post


We can all be angels to one another. We can choose to obey the still small stirring within, the little whisper that says, “Go. Ask. Reach out. Be an answer to someone’s plea. You have a part to play. Have faith.” We can decide to risk that He is indeed there, watching, caring, cherishing us as we love and accept love. The world will be a better place for it.—Joan Wester Anderson


The oldest, shortest words—“yes” and “no”—are those which require the most thought.—Pythagoras


“A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.”—John C. Maxwell


“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.”—Amelia Earhart


“I believe that the Christian life is a conversation with God and man. We should live as if the world is listening to what our every action says about the validity of our faith.”—Shaun Groves


“If you would be loved, love, and be loveable.”—Ben Franklin


“A man would do nothing, if he waited until he could do it so well that no one at all would find fault with what he has done.”—Cardinal Newman


“Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.”—Henry Van Dyke Jr.


“It is infinitely better to have a few good men than many indifferent ones.”—George Washington


“Selfless service has always been one of the most powerful methods of influence.”—Stephen Covey


“In life, the winds of circumstances blow on us all in an unending flow that touches each of our lives. We all experience the blowing winds of change. Yet some of us still manage to reach our intended destinations. What guides us to different shores is determined by the way we have chosen to set our sails. The way that each of us thinks makes the major difference in where each of us arrives. When things change, we must change. We must struggle to our feet again and reset the sail to steer us toward the destination of our own deliberate choosing. The set of the sail—how we think and how we respond—has a far greater capacity to alter our lives than any challenges we face.”—Jim Rohn


What secret trouble stirs thy heart?
Why all this fret and flurry?
Dost thou not know that what is best
In this too restless world is rest
From overwork and hurry?

   —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


“A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world—and might even be more difficult to save.”—C. S. Lewis


“The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions—the little, soon-forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment.”—Samuel Taylor Coleridge


“If I were asked to give what I consider the single most useful bit of advice for all humanity it would be this: Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life and when it comes, hold your head high, look it squarely in eye and say, ‘I will be bigger than you. You cannot defeat me.’”—Ann Landers


“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”—Martin Luther King Jr.


“In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.”—Albert Schweitzer


“What experience and history teach is this: that people and governments have never learned anything from history.”—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel


It is easy to die for Christ.
It is hard to live for Him.
Dying takes only an hour or two,
But to live for Christ
Means to die daily.
Only during the few years of this life
Are we given the privilege of serving
Each other and Christ…
We shall have heaven forever,
But only a short time for service here,
And therefore we must not waste the opportunity.
  —Sadhu Sundar Singh


“The finest gift you can give anyone is encouragement. Yet, almost no one gets the encouragement they need to grow to their full potential. If everyone received the encouragement they need to grow, the genius in most everyone would blossom and the world would produce abundance beyond our wildest dreams.”—Sidney Madwed


“God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars.”—Elbert Hubbard


“You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.”—Audrey Hepburn


“Worry is interest paid on trouble before it falls due.”—William Ralph Inge


“It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.”—Theodore Roosevelt


“It is an undoubted truth, that the less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in.”—Lord Chesterfield


“Though, in terms of history, the darkness falls, blacking out us and our world, You have overcome history. You came as light into the world in order that whoever believed in You should not remain in darkness. Your light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Nor ever will.”—Malcolm Muggeridge

April 2022

“A problem is a chance for you to do your best.”—Duke Ellington


Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.—Charles Dickens


If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.—Martin Luther King Jr.


“There is no need to plead that the love of God shall fill our heart as though he were unwilling to fill us. He is willing as light is willing to flood a room that is opened to its brightness; willing as water is willing to flow into an emptied channel. Love is pressing round us on all sides like air. Cease to resist, and instantly love takes possession.”—Amy Carmichael


“Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.”—Louisa May Alcott


“I always wanted to be someone better the next day than I was the day before.”—Sidney Poitier


“Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.”—C. S. Lewis


There was a man, though some did count him mad,
The more he cast away, the more he had.
—From The Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan


“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”—Seneca


“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.”—Henry Ford


“If you go looking for a friend, you’re going to find they’re very scarce. If you go out to be a friend, you’ll find them everywhere.”—Zig Ziglar


“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a little better; whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is the meaning of success.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“There are no ordinary people. You have never met a mere mortal.”—C. S. Lewis


“If Christ is risen, nothing else matters. And if Christ is not risen—nothing else matters.”—Jaroslav Pelikan


“The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.”—Abraham Lincoln


“Status quo is Latin for ‘the mess we’re in.’”—Unknown


It is a mistake to suppose that any technological innovation has a one-sided effect. Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but both-and. Nothing could be more obvious, especially to those who have given more than two minutes of thought to the matter. Nonetheless, we are currently surrounded by throngs of one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo. They gaze on technology as a lover does on his beloved, seeing it as without blemish and entertaining no apprehension for the future.—Neil Postman


“Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.”—Richard Foster


“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”—Kurt Vonnegut


“Youth is the first victim of war; the first fruit of peace. It takes 20 years or more of peace to make a man; it takes only 20 seconds of war to destroy him.”—King Baudouin I of Belgium


“You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world’s happiness now. How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to someone who is lonely or discouraged.”—Dale Carnegie


“I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition.”—Martha Washington


What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
—W. H. Davies


“The whole world is a series of miracles, but we're so used to them we call them ordinary things.”—Hans Christian Andersen


“Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now.”—Charlotte P. Gilman


“It is far easier to make war than to make peace.”—Georges Clemenceau


“Procrastination is like a credit card: it’s a lot of fun until you get the bill.”—Christopher Parker


“The baby rises to its feet, takes a step, is overcome with triumph and joy—and falls flat on its face. It is a pattern for all that is to come! But learn from the bewildered baby. Lurch to your feet again. You’ll make the sofa in the end.”—Pam Brown


“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”—Dwight Eisenhower


“In times of turbulence and rapid change, you must constantly be re-evaluating yourself relative to the new realities.”—Brian Tracy

March 2022

“Nothing would be done at all if we waited until we could do it so well that no one could find fault with it.”—Cardinal Newman


“I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do! That is character!”—Theodore Roosevelt


“Every enduring marriage involves an unconditional commitment to an imperfect person—your spouse.”—Gary Smalley


Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly, as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to face many a danger, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.—Annie Besant


“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart.”—Helen Keller


“Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly, even if they roll a few more upon it.”—Albert Schweitzer


Today is a new day. You will get out of it just what you put into it. … If you have made mistakes, even serious mistakes, there is always another chance for you. And supposing you have tried and failed again and again, you may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call “failure” is not the falling down, but the staying down.—Mary Pickford


“You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for his own improvement and, at the same time, share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.”—Marie Curie


“Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.”—Brian Tracy


“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.”—Edmund Burke


“It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.”—Samuel Smiles


“Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.”—Margaret Fuller


“A man should always consider ... how much more unhappy he might be than he is.”—Joseph Addison


“Those who are lifting the world upward and onward are those who encourage more than criticize.”—Elizabeth Harrison


“Everything in moderation, including moderation.”—Oscar Wilde


“Experience is the thing we gain the moment after we needed it.”—Steve Wright


“Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.”—Arnold Schwarzenegger


“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood...who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and ... if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”—Theodore Roosevelt


“People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.”—Otto von Bismarck


“In the spiritual life, the battlefield is the mind. A mind filled and saturated with the Word of God is a mighty weapon in the hand of the God of that Word.”—Adrian Rogers


“I’ve never met a person, I don’t care what his condition, in whom I could not see possibilities. I don’t care how much a man may consider himself a failure, I believe in him, for he can change the thing that is wrong in his life at any time he is ready and prepared to do it. Whenever he develops the desire, he can take away from his life the thing that is defeating it. The capacity for reformation and change lies within.”—Preston Bradley


“Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.”—Thomas Jefferson


“What we obtain too cheap we esteem too little; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.”—Thomas Paine


“Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.”—Sir James M. Barrie


“You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.”—Margaret Thatcher


“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the streets declare the sinfulness of man.”—Marvin Olasky


“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.”—William Pollard


“If we have not quiet in our minds, outward comfort will do no more for us than a golden slipper on a gouty foot.”—John Bunyan


“Happiness does not come from doing easy work but from the afterglow of satisfaction that comes after the achievement of a difficult task that demanded our best.”—Theodore Isaac Rubin

February 2022

“Well done is better than well said.”—Ben Franklin


“Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.”—Abraham Lincoln


“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”—William Pitt


“What a cruel thing is war: to separate and destroy families and friends, and mar the purest joys and happiness God has granted us in this world; to fill our hearts with hatred instead of love for our neighbors, and to devastate the fair face of this beautiful world.”—Robert E. Lee, letter to his wife, 1864


Joy on demand: “Notice the joyful moments in your day, however small, however fleeting. Notice how good it feels to have that first sip of your drink. Or how tasty that first bite of food is. The pleasurable feeling of your skin in warm water when you wash your hands or take a shower. The moment of delight and comfort when you see your friend. These thin slices of joy only last a few seconds but they add up! The more you notice joy, the more you will experience joy in your life.”—Chade-Meng Tan


“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.”—Bertrand Russell


“It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.”—Edmund Hillary


“Treat everyone you meet as though they’re the most important person you’ll meet that day.”—Roger Dawson


“We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.”—Helen Keller


“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”—Carl Jung


“All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers.”—François Fénelon 


“Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing till it gets there.”—Josh Billings


“Great character is made up of doing the small things in the right way every day, and over a lifetime, this leads you to the big things that really matter in a way that pleases God, and you are proud of.”—Dan Reiland


“Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.”—Goethe


“Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.”—Peter Ustinov


“Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.”—Robert Frost


Diplomacy is the art of saying “Nice doggie” until you can find a rock.—Will Rogers


“Don't forget to tell your favorite people that you love them.”—Shirley Temple


“History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.”—Napoleon Bonaparte


“I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.”—George Burns


“Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.”—Leo Tolstoy


“If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in the dark with a mosquito.”—Betty Reese


“Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.”—Theodore Roosevelt


“Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith.”—Henry Ward Beecher


“Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you.”—Henry Ward Beecher


“Any energy that goes into what doesn't matter comes at the expense of what does.”—Unknown


“It takes a long time to grow an old friend.”—John Leonard


“I thank God for my handicaps, for, through them, I have found myself, my work, and my God.”—Helen Keller

January 2022

“You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”—C. S. Lewis


“We will be more successful in all our endeavors if we can let go of the habit of running all the time, and take little pauses to relax and re-center ourselves. And we'll also have a lot more joy in living.”—Thích Nhất Hạnh


“He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.”—Muhammad Ali


“When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.”—Willie Nelson


“The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year.”—John Foster Dulles


“Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”—John Stuart Mill


“How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.”—Annie Dillard


“Heroes always have their scars. Some you see, some you read about later on.”—George Foreman


“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul—and sings the tunes without the words—and never stops at all.”—Emily Dickinson


“No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.”—Dorothy Day


“Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.”—John Perry Barlow


“Cultivate a thankful spirit! It will be to thee a perpetual feast. There is, or ought to be, with us no such thing as small mercies; all are great, because the least are undeserved. Indeed, a really thankful heart will extract motive for gratitude from everything, making the most even of scanty blessings.”—J. R. MacDuff


“A man does not have to be an angel in order to be a saint.”—Albert Schweitzer


“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you’ll help them to become what they are capable of becoming.”—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe


“Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.”—Babe Ruth


“A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.”—Charles Evans Hughes


“Say what you mean, mean what you say, and do not be mean when you say it.”—Meryl Runion 


“Youth is not a period of time. It is a state of mind, a result of the will, a quality of the imagination, a victory of courage over timidity, of the taste for adventure over the love of comfort. A man doesn’t grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deserts his ideal. The years may wrinkle his skin, but deserting his ideal wrinkles his soul. Preoccupations, fears, doubts, and despair are the enemies which slowly bow us toward earth and turn us into dust before death. You will remain young as long as you are open to what is beautiful, good, and great; receptive to the messages of other men and women, of nature, and of God. If one day you should become bitter, pessimistic, and gnawed by despair, may God have mercy on your old man’s soul.”—Gen. Douglas MacArthur


“One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears—by listening to them.”—Dean Rusk


“You can’t have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time.”—Charles F. Kettering


“Grace means that in the middle of our struggle the referee blows the whistle and announces the end of the game. We are declared winners and sent to the showers. It’s over for all huffing, puffing piety to earn God’s favor; it’s finished for all sweat-soaked straining to secure self-worth; it’s the end of all competitive scrambling to get ahead of others in the game. Grace means that God is on our side and thus we are victors regardless of how well we have played the game. We might as well head for the showers and the champagne celebration.”—Donald McCullough


“The secret of happiness is not doing what one likes to do, but in liking what one has to do.”—Sir James M. Barrie


“Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; Some blunders and absurdities crept in; Forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


Decisions determine destiny.—Frederick Speakman


We all have shadows and skeletons in our backgrounds. But listen, there is something bigger in this world than we are and that something bigger is full of grace and mercy, patience and ingenuity. The moment the focus of your life shifts from your badness to his goodness and the question becomes not “What have I done?” but “What can he do?” release from remorse can happen; miracle of miracles, you can forgive yourself because you are forgiven, accept yourself because you are accepted, and begin to start building up the very places you once tore down. There is grace to help in every time of trouble.—Brennan Manning


“What you possess in the world will be found at the day of your death to belong to someone else. But what you are will be yours forever.”—Henry Van Dyke


“A small trouble is like a pebble. Hold it too close to your eye and it fills the whole world and puts everything out of focus. Hold it at a proper distance and it can be examined and properly classified. Throw it at your feet and it can be seen in its true setting, just one more tiny bump on the pathway of life.”—Celia Luce


“Everyday courage has few witnesses. But yours is no less noble because no drum beats before you and no crowds shout your name.”—Robert Louis Stevenson


“Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”—George Bernard Shaw


“Today is the first day of your life because it has never been before, and today is the last day of your life because it will never be again.”—Frederick Buechner

December 2021

“You could just as easily change your life today as any other day. You don’t need to wait for January first.”—Dan Kennedy


“The difference between where you are and where God wants you to be may be the painful decision you refuse to make.”—Craig Groeschel


“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.”—Benjamin Franklin


“Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals.”—Samuel Ullman


“If you want to feel rich, just count all of the things you have that money can’t buy.”—Author Unknown


“To see people who will notice a need in the world and do something about it. . . . Those are my heroes.”—Fred Rogers


There was a gift to each of us left under the tree of life 2000 years ago by Him whose birthday we celebrate today. The gift was withheld from no man. Some have left the packages unclaimed. Some have accepted the gift and carried it around, but have failed to remove the wrapping and look inside to discover the hidden splendor. The packages are all alike: in each is a scroll on which is written, “All that the Father hath is thine!” Take and live!—Frank S. Mead


Christmas is not the tinsel and lights and outward show…
The secret lies in an inner glow.
It’s lighting a fire inside the heart…
Good will and joy a vital part.
It’s higher thought and a greater plan.
It’s a glorious dream in the soul of man.
Christmas begins deep down inside…
Then engulfs the world like a mighty tide!
    —Wilfred A. Peterson


“I truly believe that if we keep telling the Christmas story, singing the Christmas songs, and living the Christmas spirit, we can bring joy and happiness and peace to this world.”—Norman Vincent Peale


“I will not be a common man because it is my right to be an uncommon man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony.”—Peter O’Toole


“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.”—John W. Gardner


“My idea of Christmas, whether old-fashioned or modern, is very simple: loving others. Come to think of it, why do we have to wait for Christmas to do that?”—Bob Hope


“Prayer breaks all bars, dissolves all chains, opens all prisons, and widens all straits by which God’s saints have been held.”—E. M. Bounds


“When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.”—George Washington Carver


“Christmas is most truly Christmas when we celebrate it by giving the light of love to those who need it most.”—Ruth Carter Stapleton


“Patience is the companion of wisdom.”—Saint Augustine


“It is Christmas in the heart that puts Christmas in the air.”—W. T. Ellis


“What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone? How else can we put ourselves in harmonious relation with the great verities and consolations of the infinite and the eternal?”—Winston Churchill


“There is nothing so easy to learn as experience and nothing so hard to apply.”—Josh Billings


“It's very important that we relearn the art of resting and relaxing. Not only does it help prevent the onset of many illnesses that develop through chronic tension and worrying; it allows us to clear our minds, focus, and find creative solutions to problems.”—Thích Nhất Hạnh


“I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.”—Elizabeth Barrett Browning


“Christmas! ‘Tis the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial fire of charity in the heart.”—Washington Irving


“Majority rule only works if you’re also considering individual rights. Because you can’t have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper.”—Larry Flynt


“You simply will not be the same person two months from now after consciously giving thanks each day for the abundance that exists in your life. And you will have set in motion an ancient spiritual law: the more you have and are grateful for, the more will be given you.”—Sarah Ban Breathnack


“Words are things; and a small drop of ink / Falling like dew upon a thought, produces / That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.”—Lord Byron


“Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it.”—Harry Emerson Fosdick


“Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well.”—Josh Billings


“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”—Sir Winston Churchill


“Will you look back on life and say, ‘I wish I had,’ or ‘I’m glad I did’?”—Zig Ziglar


“We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.”—Jimmy Carter


“Individual commitment to a group effort—that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.”—Vince Lombardi

November 2021

“God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame.”—Elizabeth Barrett Browning


“I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”—Dorothy Day


“A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.”—Dwight D. Eisenhower


“Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”—Will Durant


“I always prefer to believe the best of everybody, it saves so much trouble.”—Rudyard Kipling


“The more you recognize and express gratitude for the things you have, the more things you will have to express gratitude for.”—Zig Ziglar


“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”—Kurt Vonnegut


“This present moment used to be the unimaginable future.”—Stewart Brand


“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.”—Anne Lamott


“The deeds you do today may be the only sermon some people will hear today.”—St. Francis of Assisi


“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”—Emily Dickinson


“They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.”—Sir Francis Bacon


“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”—Herbert Simon


“The virtue of man ought to be measured, not by his extraordinary exertions, but by his everyday conduct.”—Blaise Pascal


“Those things that hurt, instruct.”—Benjamin Franklin


“The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.”—Alvin Toffler


“One moment of patience may ward off a great disaster; one moment of impatience may ruin a whole life.”—Chinese proverb


“The greater part of happiness or misery depends on our dispositions, and not on our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us in our minds wherever we go.”—Martha Washington


“Be present. … Who is so talented that they can afford to bring only part of themselves to bear on a problem or opportunity? Whose relationships are so strong that they can get away with not showing up? Who is so certain that they’ll get another moment that they can confidently skip over this one? The less energy we waste regretting the past or worrying about the future, the more energy we will have for what’s in front of us.”—Ryan Holiday


“We’ve all been given a gift. The challenge is to figure out what you’re going to do with what you’ve been given. ... Are you going to stand for good or for evil? ... Because in the world we live in today, it’s what each one of us has to do: decide just where we’re going to stand. Me? I’m standing on the side of God.”—Denzel Washington


“Trouble is part of your life, and if you don’t share it, you don’t give the person who loves you a chance to love you enough.”—Dinah Shore


“There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.”—Montesquieu


“Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated; you can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.”—David Lloyd George


“Life is like a great big grinding wheel. Whether it wears you down or polishes you up depends on what you’re made of.”—Author Unknown


“Words are singularly the most powerful force available to humanity. We can choose to use this force constructively with words of encouragement, or destructively using words of despair. Words have energy and power with the ability to help, to heal, to hinder, to hurt, to harm, to humiliate, and to humble.”—Yehuda Berg


“Live so that when your children think of fairness, caring, and integrity, they think of you.”—H. Jackson Brown Jr.


“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”—J.R.R. Tolkien


“Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them, but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight. True education combines intellect, beauty, goodness, and the greatest of these is goodness. When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life or the life of another.”—Helen Keller


“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.”—H. L. Mencken


“The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one’s work seriously and taking one’s self seriously. The first is imperative, and the second is disastrous.”—Margot Fonteyn

October 2021

“Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolutions.”—Kahlil Gibran


“You are 100 percent responsible for 50 percent of any relationship.”—Wyatt Webb


“Most of us die with our music unplayed. ... We should try to step out of our comfort zones and do the things we’re capable of.”—Mary Kay Ash


“Those who think it is permissible to tell white lies soon grow color-blind.”—Austin O’Malley


“Nothing is really lost. It’s just where it doesn’t belong.”—Suzanne Mueller


“Persistent love—like the dripping of water on a rock—can wear away a person’s resistance. It’s nearly impossible to stay angry with or emotionally distant from someone who unconditionally loves you.”—Gary Smalley


“History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse, or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster”—General Douglas MacArthur


“Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, Make Me Feel Important. Not only will you succeed in sales, you will succeed in life.”—Mary Kay Ash


“At the center of the universe is a loving heart that continues to beat and that wants the best for every person. Anything we can do to help foster the intellect and spirit and emotional growth of our fellow human beings, that is our job. Those of us who have this particular vision must continue against all odds. Life is for service.”—Fred Rogers


“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle


“When you want to test the depths of a stream, don’t use both feet.”—Chinese Proverb


“Any hour of any day may be made perfect by merely choosing. It is perfect if one looks toward God that entire hour, waiting for his leadership all through the hour and trying hard to do every tiny thing exactly as God wishes it done, as perfectly as possible. No emotions are necessary. Just the doing of God's will perfectly makes the hour a perfect one. And the results of that one perfect hour, I believe, will echo down through eternity.”—Frank Laubach


“The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.”—Theodore Roosevelt


“True love does not come by finding the perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.”—Unknown


“A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives the rose.”—Chinese proverb


“There’s strength in admitting a weakness. Most of us are vulnerable in certain areas of our lives, and those who are wise and ambitious will admit their weaknesses and vulnerability.”—Zig Ziglar


“There will always be some curve ball in your life. Teach your children to thrive in that adversity.”—Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe


“Your profession is not what brings home your paycheck. Your profession is what you were put on earth to do with such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling.”—Vincent Van Gogh


“You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.”—Leo Aikman


“Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due.”—William R. Inge


“Any man worth his salt will stick up for what he believes right, but it takes a slightly bigger man to acknowledge instantly and without reservation that he is in error.”—Gen. Peyton C. March


“A day dawns, quite like other days; in it, a single hour comes, quite like other hours; but in that day and in that hour the chance of a lifetime faces us.”—Maltbie Babcock


“Some doctors say that cheerful people resist disease better than grumpy ones. The surly bird catches the germ.”—Unknown


“The road to wisdom? Well, it’s plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again, but less and less and less.”—Piet Hein


“Love is a medicine for the sickness of the world; a prescription often given, too rarely taken.”—Karl A. Menninger


“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress.”—Mark Twain


“Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.”—Dr. Albert Schweitzer


“The reason the mainstream is referred to as a stream is because of its shallowness.”—George Carlin


“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”—Melody Beattie


“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”—Aristotle


“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”—John Lubbock

September 2021

“Most time is wasted, not in hours, but in minutes. A bucket with a small hole in the bottom gets just as empty as a bucket that is deliberately emptied.”—Paul J. Meyer


“It is expressly at those times when we feel needy that we will benefit the most from giving.”—Ruth Ross


“The course of human history consists of a series of encounters...in which each man or woman or child … is challenged by God to make [the] free choice between doing God’s will and refusing to do it. When Man refuses, he is free to make his refusal and to take the consequences.”—Historian Arnold Toynbee


“It’s a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand.”—Madeleine L’Engle


“Love will find a way. Indifference will find an excuse.”—Author unknown


“For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice. No paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.”—John Burroughs


“You’d better live every day like it’s your last day, because one day you’re going to be right.”—Ray Charles


“In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins—not through strength but by perseverance.”—H. Jackson Brown


“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul—and sings the tunes without the words—and never stops at all.”—Emily Dickinson


“Just as a small fire is extinguished by the storm whereas a large fire is enhanced by it—likewise a weak faith is weakened by predicament and catastrophes, whereas a strong faith is strengthened by them.”—Viktor E. Frankl


“Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can’t build on it, it’s only good for wallowing in.”—Katherine Mansfield


“A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.”—Charles Evans Hughes


“Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“The purpose of life is a life of purpose.”—Robert Byrne


“Things don’t go wrong and break your heart so you can become bitter and give up. They happen to break you down and build you up so you can be all that you were intended to be.”—Charles “Tremendous” Jones


“Loving people live in a loving world. Hostile people live in a hostile world. Same world.”—Wayne Dyer


“The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.”—Thomas Merton


“Jesus is not a prophet to the winners but to losers, proclaiming that the last shall be first, the weak, strong, and the fools, wise. It is the lowly, not the proud, who shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.”—Malcolm Muggeridge


“You are today where your thoughts have brought you, you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“What you possess in the world will be found at the day of your death to belong to someone else. But what you are will be yours forever.”—Henry Van Dyke


“Keep your face to the sun and you will never see the shadows.”—Helen Keller


“Everyday courage has few witnesses. But yours is no less noble because no drum beats before you and no crowds shout your name.”—Robert Louis Stevenson


“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world would do this, it would change the earth.”—William Faulkner


“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”—Ernest Hemingway


“A small trouble is like a pebble. Hold it too close to your eye and it fills the whole world and puts everything out of focus. Hold it at a proper distance and it can be examined and properly classified. Throw it at your feet and it can be seen in its true setting, just one more tiny bump on the pathway of life.”—Celia Luce


“If you haven't got any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.”—Bob Hope


“You have the capacity to choose what you think about. If you choose to think about past hurts, you will continue to feel bad. While it’s true you can’t change the effect past influences had on you once, you can change the effect they have on you now.”—Gary McKay


“Spread love everywhere you go; first of all in your house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next door neighbor. Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God's kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile.”—Mother Teresa


“Courage is not limited to the battlefield or the Indianapolis 500 or bravely catching a thief in your house. The real tests of courage are much quieter. They are the inner tests, like remaining faithful when nobody’s looking, like enduring pain when the room is empty, like standing alone when you’re misunderstood.”—Charles Swindoll


“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity—much less dissent.”—Gore Vidal

August 2021

“If thou art absolutely obe­dient to God, then there is no ambiguity in thee and . . . thou art mere simplicity before God. . . . One thing there is which all Satan’s cunning and all the snares of temptation cannot take by surprise, and that is simplicity.”—Soren Kierkegaard


“One man can make a difference and every man should try.”—Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis


“Don’t just do something, sit there! Sit there long enough each morning to decide what is really important during the day ahead.”—Richard Eyre


“The most valuable possession you can own is an open heart. The most powerful weapon you can be is an instrument of peace.”—Carlos Santana


“Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.”—James Buckham


“The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does.”—James M. Barrie


“To love is to stop comparing.”—Bernard Grasset


“Bravery is the capacity to perform properly even when scared half to death.”—General Omar Bradley


“Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.”—Charlotte Bronte


“Looking at yourself through the media is like looking at one of those rippled mirrors in an amusement park.”—Edmund S. Muskie


“I owe all my success in life to hav­ing been always a quarter of an hour beforehand.”—Horatio Nelson


“Try to make at least one person happy every day. If you cannot do a kind deed, speak a kind word. If you cannot speak a kind word, think a kind thought. Count up, if you can, the treasure of happiness that you would dispense in a week, in a year, in a lifetime!”—Lawrence Lovasik


“There’s a better way to do it. Find it!”—Thomas Edison


Listen to what Jesus speaks to you from the cross: “I’m dying to be with you. I’m really dying to be with you.” And then He whispers, “Will you die a little to be with Me?”—Brennan Manning


“Youth is not a period of time. It is a state of mind, a result of the will, a quality of the imagination, a victory of courage over timidity, of the taste for adventure over the love of comfort. A man doesn’t grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deserts his ideal. The years may wrinkle his skin, but deserting his ideal wrinkles his soul. Preoccupations, fears, doubts, and despair are the enemies which slowly bow us toward earth and turn us into dust before death. You will remain young as long as you are open to what is beautiful, good, and great; receptive to the messages of other men and women, of nature, and of God. If one day you should become bitter, pessimistic, and gnawed by despair, may God have mercy on your old man’s soul.”—Douglas MacArthur


“Everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.”—Robert Louis Stevenson


Every day, everyone you know faces life with eternity on the line, and life has a way of beating people down. Every life needs a cheering section. Every life needs a shoulder to lean on once in a while. Every life needs a prayer to lift them up to God. Every life needs a hugger to wrap some arms around them sometimes. Every life needs to hear a voice saying, “Don’t give up.”—John Ortberg


“Don’t fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have and should have.”—Louis Boone


“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.”—Thomas Paine


“Every one of us alone has the power to direct the course of our lives by choosing what actions we will or won’t take. While sometimes it’s eas­ier to believe you don’t have a choice, the real­ity is that you always have a choice to behave differently.”—Francine Ward


“Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.”—Henry Van Dyke


“Prayer is never a private inner act disconnected from day-to-day realities. It is, rather, the interior battlefield where the decisive victory is won before any engagement in the outer world is even possible.”—Thomas Merton


“No man ever achieved worthwhile success who did not, at one time or other, find himself with at least one foot hanging well over the brink of failure.”—Napoleon Hill


“One of the things I learned during my tenure in Washington is that the civics book picture of government in operations is completely inaccurate. The idea that our elected officials take part in a careful decision-making process—monitoring events, reviewing options, responsi­bly selecting policies—has almost no connection with re­ality. A more accurate image would be that of a runaway train with the throttle stuck wide open—while the passen­gers and crew are living it up in the dining car.”—Former U.S. Treasury Secretary William Simon


“Your mate doesn’t live by bread alone. Every once in a while he or she needs to be buttered up.”—Zig Ziglar


“You will either step forward into growth or you will step back into safety.”—Abraham Maslow


“You cannot live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.”—John Wooden


“Patience is not passive; on the contrary, it is active; it is concentrated strength.”—Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton


“Experience is something I always think I have until I get more of it.”—Dan Kaercher


“There is no security on this Earth, there is only opportunity.”—General Douglas MacArthur


“The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become—because He made us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be…. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.”—C. S. Lewis

July 2021

“Trust the past to the mercy of God, the present to his love, and the future to his providence.”—St. Augustine


“If you came and you found a strange man ... teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you’d kick him right out of the house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don’t think twice about it.”—Jerome Singer


“Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.”—Suzy Kassem


“It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.”—John Andrew Holmes


“The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.”—Charles Lamb


“It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.”—Bertrand Russell


“The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it; but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.”—Germaine De Stael


“What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive?”—Irv Kupcinet


“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength.”—Corrie ten Boom


“Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk.”—Doug Larson


“I’m often amazed at the way politicians, who spend hours poring over opinion poll results in a desperate attempt to discover what the public thinks, are certain they know precisely what God’s views are on everything.”—Simon Hoggart


“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”—Peter F. Drucker


“If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.”—James A. Garfield


“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.”—Edmund Burke


“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain.”—Emily Dickinson


“Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.”—George Bernard Shaw


“I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.”—Theodore Roosevelt


“Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.”—Arnold Bennett


“Perhaps it would be a good idea, fantastic as it sounds, to muffle every telephone, stop every motor and halt all activity for one hour some day just to give people a chance to ponder for a few minutes on what it is all about, why they are living and what they really want.”—James Truslow Adams


“Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.”—Phillips Brooks


“Happiness comes from spiritual wealth, not material wealth . . . Happiness comes from giving, not getting. If we try hard to bring happiness to others, we cannot stop it from coming to us also. To get joy, we must give it, and to keep joy, we must scatter it.”—John Templeton


“We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.”—Jesse Owens


“One of the major reasons why people are not doing well is because they keep trying to get through the day. A more worthy challenge is to try to get from the day. We must become sensitive enough to observe and ponder what is happening around us. Be alert. Be awake. Often, the most extraordinary opportunities are hidden among the seemingly insignificant events of life. If we do not pay attention to these events, we can easily miss the opportunities.”—Jim Rohn


“Wisdom is oftentimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.”—William Wordsworth


“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”—Martin Luther


“One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon—instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.”—Dale Carnegie


“Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything.”—Wyatt Earp


“Love isn’t like a reservoir. You’ll never drain it dry. It’s much more like a natural spring. The longer and the farther it flows, the stronger and the deeper and the clearer it becomes.”—Eddie Cantor


“My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.”—Hank Aaron


“Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.”—Newt Gingrich


“You will find, as you look back upon your life, that the moments when you really lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.”—Henry Drummond

June 2021

“Action is the antidote to despair.”—Joan Baez


“The way you overcome shyness is to become so wrapped up in something that you forget to be afraid.”—Lady Bird Johnson


“I have found the paradox that if I love until it hurts, then there is no hurt, but only more love.”—Mother Teresa


“Think of giving not as a duty but as a privilege.”—John D. Rockefeller Jr.


O Christian worker, Christian soldier, Christian pilgrim, in the midst of your “contest” and your “running” today, or in what seems the midst of it, for the end may all the while be just upon you, take heart often from the thought that even so for you, if you are true to the blessed Name, it shall one day be. The last care will have been felt and cast upon the Lord, the last exhausting effort will have been made, the last witness under difficulties borne, the last sorrow faced and entered, the last word written, the last word spoken. And then the one remaining thing will be to let the Lord, “the Man at the Gate,” lift thee in, and give thee rest.—Bishop Moule


“When a man realizes his littleness, his greatness can appear.”—H. G. Wells


“The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.”—Jonas Salk


“It is the little bits of things that fret and worry us; we can dodge an elephant, but we can’t dodge a fly.”—Josh Billings


“Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.”—Henry David Thoreau


“I always prefer to believe the best of everybody—it saves so much trouble.”—Rudyard Kipling


“A disbelief in God does not result in a belief in nothing; disbelief in God usually results in a belief in anything.”—Author unknown


“The two great words of antiquity are behold and beware. Behold the possibilities and beware the temptations.”—Jim Rohn


“Do not keep the alabaster boxes of your love and tenderness sealed up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness. Speak approving, cheering words while their ears can hear them and while their hearts can be thrilled by them.”—Henry Ward Beecher


“I will not doubt, though all my ships at sea come drifting home with broken masts and sails; I shall believe the hand which never fails, from seeming evil worketh good to me. And, though I weep because those sails are battered, still will I cry, while my best hopes lie shattered, ‘I trust in thee.’”—Ella Wheeler Wilcox


“To educate a person in the mind but not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”—Theodore Roosevelt


“One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.”—Eleanor Roosevelt


“A truly charming person never has time for envy, self-pity, or gossip.”—Loretta Young


“Life is made up of little things. It is very rarely that an occasion is offered for doing a great deal at once. True greatness consists in being great in the little things.”—Charles Simmons


“It is not how many years we live, but what we do with them. It is not what we receive, but what we give to others.”—Evangeline Booth


“Act as if you were already happy and that will tend to make you happy.”—Dale Carnegie


“The battles that count aren't the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself—the invisible battles inside all of us—that’s where it's at.”—Jesse Owens


“Character is the ability to follow through on a resolution long after the emotion with which it was made has passed.”—Brian Tracy


“I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.”—Pearl S. Buck


“A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.”—Christopher Reeve


“Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we’ve been bombing over the years been complaining?”—George Wallace


“As we look back to our suffering, we shall see that [it’s] not worthy to be compared to our first night's welcome home in heaven.”—Samuel Rutherford


“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”—John Keats


“The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this, we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.”—C. S. Lewis


“Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.”—Marcus Aurelius


“Make the most of the best and the least of the worst.”—Robert Louis Stevenson

May 2021

“There is nothing so fatal to character as half finished tasks.”—David Lloyd George


“Maturity begins to grow when you can sense your concern for others outweighing your concern for yourself.”—John MacNaughton


“One of the greatest victories you can gain over someone is to beat him at politeness.”—Josh Billings


“It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.”—Lena Horne


“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”—G. K. Chesterton


“Faith grows more with the sharp winter storm in its face. Grace withers without adversity. Whatever direction the wind blows, it will blow us to the Lord.”—Samuel Rutherford


“Our small efforts at kindness can change people’s lives more than we will ever know. Since it takes so little time and energy to change the world for the better, why not make an effort to do it every day?”—Pat Williams


“We all need encouragement. We can live without it just as a young tree can live without fertilizer, but unless we receive that warm nurturing, we never reach our full potential, and like the tree left to itself, we seldom bear fruit.”—Florence Littauer


“Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.”—Oscar Wilde


“Say what you mean, mean what you say, and do not be mean when you say it.”—Meryl Runion


“God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame.”—Elizabeth Barrett Browning


“True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others, at whatever cost.”—Arthur Ashe


“A cloudy day is no match for a sunny disposition.”—William Arthur Ward


“Good is not good where better is expected.”—Thomas Fuller


“In case you’re worried about what’s going to become of the younger generation, it’s going to grow up and start worrying about the younger generation.”—Roger Allen


“All appears to change when we change.”—Henri-Frédéric Amiel


“Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.”—George Eliot


“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”—Isaac Asimov


“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”—Seneca


“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.”—Jonathan Swift


The Christian life is best lived dangerously. Playing it safe won’t yield much fruit. People who risk friendships or jobs or, even worse, their own lives for the sake of the Gospel will get the most results. Living the faith well—“fighting the good fight”—requires strict discipline, self-denial, and a willingness to expose oneself to danger. This is where trust comes in. God may not deliver you from suffering right away, but he will sustain you and ultimately reward you. And the knowledge that you have risked all for his sake will exhilarate you.—Brad Locke


“Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.”—J. M. Barrie


“If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?”—Sydney J. Harris


“Nobody stands taller than those willing to stand corrected.”—William Safire


“When nobody around you seems to measure up, it’s time to check your yardstick.”—Bill Lemley


“Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.”—Corrie ten Boom


“You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him.”—Audrey Hepburn


“He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.”—Albert Einstein


“Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.”—Helen Keller


“We do not need the grace of God to stand crises, human nature and pride are sufficient, we can face the strain magnificently; but it does require the supernatural grace of God to live twenty-four hours in every day as a saint, to go through drudgery as a disciple, to live an ordinary, unobserved, ignored existence as a disciple of Jesus.”—Oswald Chambers


“God gives every bird his worm, but He does not throw it into the nest.”—P. D. James

April 2021

“It’s a strange thing, you have said it thousands of times I am sure ... you will never know what you can do until you try. However, the sad truth is that most people never try anything until they know they can do it.”—Bob Proctor


“May we think of freedom, not as the right to do as we please, but as the opportunity to do what is right.”—Peter Marshall


“Make it a point to do something every day that you don’t want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.”—Mark Twain


“Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”—Robert H. Jackson


“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”—John Fitzgerald Kennedy


“We need quiet time to examine our lives openly and honestly... spending quiet time alone gives your mind an opportunity to renew itself and create order.”—Susan Taylor


“Our military and weapons prowess is a fantastic and perfectly weighted hammer, but that doesn’t make every international problem a nail.”—Rachel Maddow


“If you wouldn’t write it and sign it, don’t say it.”—Earl Wilson


“It is better that all things should work for my good than all things should be as I would wish them to be. If all things do not always please me, [I know] they will always benefit me.”—Charles Spurgeon


“To the wrongs that need resistance, To the right that needs assistance, To the future in the distance, Give yourselves.”—Carrie Chapman Catt


“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.”—Dolly Parton


“I’d rather be a could-be if I cannot be an are; because a could-be is a maybe who is reaching for a star. I’d rather be a has-been than a might-have-been, by far; for a might-have-been has never been, but a has was once an are.”—Milton Berle


“Faith is not a cushion for me to fall back upon; it is my working energy.”—Helen Keller


“God sends children for another purpose than merely to keep up the race—to enlarge our hearts and to make us unselfish and full of kindly sympathies and affections; to give our souls higher aims; to call out all our faculties to extended enterprise and exertion; and to bring round our firesides bright faces, happy smiles, and loving tender hearts. My soul blesses the great Father every day, that he has gladdened the earth with little children.”—Mary Howitt


“Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that’s not true. Some of the smaller countries are neutral.”—Robert Orben


“Cheerfulness and contentment are great beautifiers and are famous preservers of youthful looks.”—Charles Dickens


“If I were asked to give what I consider the single most useful bit of advice for all humanity, it would be this: Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life, and when it comes, hold your head high. Look it squarely in the eye, and say, ‘I will be bigger than you. You cannot defeat me.’”—Ann Landers


“Any time you sincerely want to make a change, the first thing you must do is to raise your standards. When people ask me what really changed my life eight years ago, I tell them that absolutely the most important thing was changing what I demanded of myself. I wrote down all the things I would no longer accept in my life, all the things I would no longer tolerate, and all the things that I aspired to becoming.”—Anthony Robbins


“It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities.”—Josiah Stamp


“The Bible shows that all of us have a choice. It isn’t just a choice between God and the Devil or Heaven and Hell. No, this choice is much more subtle. Each day you and I must choose the kind of treasure to which we will devote our lives. Either we will spend our lives filling our attic and garage with a lifetime of collectibles or we will spend our lives laying up treasures in Heaven.”—Mark Tabb


“Stick to your task till it sticks to you,
Beginners are many but enders are few.
Honor, power, place and praise
Come in time to the one who stays.”—Unknown


“The mistake we make is when we seek to be loved, instead of loving.”—Charlotte Yonge


“Never part without loving words to think of during your absence. It may be that you will not meet again in this life.”—Jean Paul Richter


“Learn how to separate the majors and the minors. A lot of people don’t do well simply because they major in minor things.”—Jim Rohn


“The man who graduates today and stops learning tomorrow is uneducated the day after.”—Newton D. Baker


“What would you do, how would you change your life, if you learned today that you only had six months to live?”—Brian Tracy


Despite our efforts to keep him out, God intrudes. The life of Jesus is bracketed by two impossibilities: a virgin’s womb and an empty tomb. Jesus entered our world through a door marked “No Entrance” and left through a door marked “No Exit.”—Peter Larson


“Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.”—Potter Stewart


“Large hearts always have room for something more.”—Henry Jowett


“Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.”—Laurence J. Peter

March 2021

“Discovery of a solution consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”—Albert Szent-Gyorgyi


“One way to get high blood pressure is to go mountain climbing over molehills.”—Earl Wilson


“Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, riches take wing, and only character endures.”—Horace Greeley


“I have never met a person whose greatest need was anything other than real, unconditional love. You can find it in a simple act of kindness toward someone who needs help. There is no mistaking love. You feel it in your heart. It is the common fiber of life, the flame of that heats our soul, energizes our spirit and supplies passion to our lives. It is our connection to God and to each other.”—Elizabeth Kubler-Ross


“Material success may result in the accumulation of possessions: but only spiritual success will enable you to enjoy them.”—Nido Qubein


“A man should not leave this earth with unfinished business. He should live each day as if it was a pre-flight check. He should ask each morning, am I prepared to lift-off?”—Diane Frolov


“Our children give us the opportunity to become the parents we always wished we’d had.”—Louise Hart


“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”—Eleanor Roosevelt


“All right, they’re on our left, they’re on our right, they’re in front of us, they’re behind us ... they can’t get away this time.”—Lt Gen Lewis B. Puller, USMC


“It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.”—J. R. R. Tolkien


“Americans are willing to expend some energy in religious activities such as attending church and reading the Bible, and they are willing to throw some money in the offering basket. Because of such activities, they convince themselves that they are people of genuine faith. But when it comes time to truly establishing their priorities and making a tangible commitment to knowing and loving God, and to allowing him to change their character and lifestyle, most people stop short. We want to be spiritual and we want to have God’s favor, but we’re not sure we want him taking control of our lives and messing with the image and outcomes we’ve worked so hard to produce.”—George Barna


“The surest test of discipline is its absence.”—Clara Barton


“Wherever you are, be all there. Live to the hilt every situation you believe to be the will of God.”—Jim Elliot


“One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.”—Dale Carnegie


“Show me a man who cannot bother to do little things and I’ll show you a man who cannot be trusted to do big things.”—Lawrence Bell


“I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.”—Og Mandino


“It’s the little things you do day in and day out that count. That’s the way you teach your children.”—Amanda Pays


“There is nothing that is more dangerous to your own salvation, more unworthy of God and more harmful to your own happiness, than that you should be content to remain as you are.”—Francois Fenelon


“It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.”—Millard Fuller


“Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me. It is an uncomfortable doctrine which the true ethics whisper into my ear. You are happy, they say; therefore you are called upon to give much.”—Albert Schweitzer


“When the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, it may be that they take better care of it there.”—Cecil Selig


“Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen.”—Peter Marshall


“Good manners will often take people where neither money nor education will take them.”—Fanny Jackson Coppin


“God’s gifts put man’s best dreams to shame.”—Elizabeth Barrett Browning


“A little faith will bring your soul to heaven; a great faith will bring heaven to your soul.”—Charles Spurgeon


“You will find, as you look back upon your life, that the moments when you really lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.”—Henry Drummond


“When a person finds themselves predisposed to complaining about how little they are regarded by others, let them reflect how little they have contributed to the happiness of others.”—Author Unknown


“I owe all my success in life to having been always a quarter of an hour beforehand.”—Horatio Nelson


“Good habits are as addictive as bad habits, and a lot more rewarding.”—Harvey Mackay


“One lesson I’ve learned is that if the job I do were easy, I wouldn’t derive so much satisfaction from it. The thrill of winning is in direct proportion to the effort I put in before. I also know, from long experience, that if you make an effort in training when you don’t especially feel like making it, the payoff is that you will win games when you are not feeling your best. That is how you win championships, that is what separates the great player from the merely good player. The difference lies in how well you’ve prepared.”—Rafael Nadal


“It is not by the gray of the hair that one knows the age of the heart.”—Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton

February 2021

“Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. ‘We have a single system,’ he wrote, and ‘in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses.’”—Gore Vidal


“Part of the good part of being a parent is a constant sense of deja vu. But some of what you have to vu you never want to vu again.”—Anna Quindlen


“Humility is to make a right estimate of one’s self.”—Charles H. Spurgeon


“If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down.”—Mary Pickford 


“Jesus doesn’t say, ‘Come to me all who are burdened and I’ll give you more to do.’ He says he’ll give you rest.”—Rick Warren 


“You will not grow if you sit in a beautiful flower garden, but you will grow if you are sick, in pain, experience losses, and if you do not put your head in the sand, but take the pain and learn to accept it, not as a curse or a punishment but as a gift to you with a very, very specific purpose.”—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross 


“Choices are the hinges of destiny.”—Edwin Markham 


“Think truly, and thy thoughts shall the world’s famine feed.

Speak truly, and each word of thine shall be a fruitful seed.

Live truly, and thy life shall be a great and noble creed.”—Horatius Bonar 


“Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.”—Josh Billings 


“Faith is not the opposite of reason. Faith rests squarely upon reason but with the added component of revelation.”—Francis Collins 


“One of life’s most painful moments comes when we must admit that we didn’t do our homework, that we are not prepared.”—Merlin Olsen 


“The unthankful heart ... discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings!”—Henry Ward Beecher 


“There are three stages to every great work of God: first it is impossible, then it is difficult, then it is done.”—Hudson Taylor 


“Thank God every day when you get up that you have something to do that day which must be done whether you like it or not. Being forced to work and forced to do your best will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.”—Basil Carpenter 


“It takes so little to make people happy—just a touch, if we know how to give it, just a word fitly spoken, or a slight readjustment of some bolt or pin or bearing in the delicate machinery of a human soul.”—Frank Crane 


“Talent wins games but teamwork and intelligence win championships.”—Michael Jordan 


“The unselfish effort to bring cheer to others will be the beginning of a happier life for ourselves.”—Helen Keller


“It is not how much we give, but how much love we put into giving.”—Mother Teresa


“Most of us tend to suffer from ‘agenda anxiety,’ the feeling that what we want to say to others is more important than what we think they might want to say to us.”—Nido Qubein


“Faith is the courage to accept acceptance, to accept that God loves me as I am and not as I should be, because I’m never going to be as I should be.”—Paul Tillich


“People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.”—R. Buckminster Fuller


“A professional is a person who can do his best at a time when he doesn’t particularly feel like it.”—Alistair Cooke


“A true Christian is neither ashamed of the gospel nor a shame to the gospel.”—Author unknown


“Act the way you’d like to be and soon you’ll be the way you act.”—George W. Crane


“To find a person who will love you for no reason, and to shower that person with reasons, that is the ultimate happiness.”—Robert Brault


“Presence is more than just being there.”—Malcolm S. Forbes


“You can conquer almost any fear if you will only make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.”—Dale Carnegie


“Of all the attitudes we can acquire, surely the attitude of gratitude is the most important and by far the most life-changing.”—Zig Ziglar

January 2021

“If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.”—Doug Larson


“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a persistent one.”—Albert Einstein 


“In actual life every great enterprise begins with and takes its first forward step in faith.”—Friedrich von Schlegel 


“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”—Albert Einstein


“It’s not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something. May I suggest that it be creating joy for others, sharing what we have for the betterment of humanity, bringing hope to the lost and love to the lonely.”—Leo Buscaglia


“Sometimes a player’s greatest challenge is coming to grips with his role on the team.”—Scottie Pippen


“God uses broken things. Broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume. It is Peter, weeping bitterly, who returns to greater power than ever.”—Vance Havner 


“I am not a has-been. I am a will be.”—Lauren Bacall 


“Don’t let the fear of striking out hold you back.”—Babe Ruth


Listen to what Jesus speaks to you from the cross: “I’m dying to be with you. I’m really dying to be with you.” And then He whispers, “Will you die a little to be with Me?”—Brennan Manning


“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”—Calvin Coolidge


“Every moment is a fresh beginning.”—T. S. Eliot 


“The best is yet to be.”—Robert Browning 


“If you want to do a good deed, do it now. The time will pass, and you will not have the chance again.”—Leo Tolstoy 


“The odds of just eight Old Testament prophecies of Jesus coming true is one in 100 million billion. That’s millions more than the total number of people who have ever lived. If you had this many silver dollars, it would cover the state of Texas two feet deep!”—Lee Strobel 


“Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.”—Herbert Hoover 


“We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.”—Marian Wright Edelman 


“To change one’s life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.”—William James 


“The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.”—John Flynn, 1944 


“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”—Henry David Thoreau 


“Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get . . . Only with what you are expected to give. . . . Which is everything.”—Katharine Hepburn 


“Resolve to be a master of change rather than a victim of change.”—Brian Tracy 


“Anyone can carry his burden, however heavy, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down, and that is all that life really means.”—Robert Louis Stevenson 


“If the Lord be with us, we have no cause of fear. His eye is upon us, his arm over us, his ear open to our prayer—his grace sufficient, his promises unchangeable.”—Attributed to John Newton 


“Wisdom is the quality that keeps you from getting into situations where you need it.”—Doug Larson 


“We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives ... not looking for flaws, but for potential.”—Ellen Goodman 


“Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.”—Saint Jerome 


“The pain passes, but the beauty remains.”—Pierre-Auguste Renoir 


“Change. It has the power to uplift, to heal, to stimulate, surprise, open new doors, bring fresh experience and create excitement in life. Certainly it is worth the risk.”—Leo Buscaglia 


“The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the grandest intention.”—Oscar Wilde 


The New Year like a book lies before me;

On its cover two words, “My Life,” I see.

I open the covers and look between—

Each page is empty, no words can be seen,

For I am a writer, I hold the pen

That’ll fill these pages to be read by men.

Just what kind of book will my book be,

My life written there for others to see,

Each day a page written, one by one—

Will it be worthwhile when finished and done?

Lord, help me keep these pages clean and fair

By living the life I’d have written there.

—Gertrude Laura Gast

December 2020

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

The flying cloud, the frosty light;

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.


Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.


Ring out the grief that saps the mind,

For those that here we see no more,

Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

Ring in redress to all mankind.


Ring out a slowly dying cause,

And ancient forms of party strife;

Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.


Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

The faithless coldness of the times;

Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,

But ring the fuller minstrel in.


Ring out false pride in place and blood,

The civic slander and the spite;

Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.


Ring out old shapes of foul disease,

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.


Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.

—G. K. Chesterton


“Bloom where you are planted.”—Mother Jones 


“Don’t spend your precious time asking, ‘Why isn’t the world a better place?’ It will only be time wasted. The question to ask is ‘How can I make it better?’ To that there is an answer.”—Leo F. Buscaglia 


“Most people spend their entire lives on a fantasy island called ‘Someday I’ll.’”—Denis Waitley 


For age is opportunity no less

Than youth itself, though in another dress,

And as the evening twilight fades away

The sky is filled with stars invisible by day. 


“We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.”—William Gladstone 


“I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year.”—Charles Dickens 


There was a gift to each of us left under the tree of life 2000 years ago by Him whose birthday we celebrate today. The gift was withheld from no man. Some have left the packages unclaimed. Some have accepted the gift and carried it around, but have failed to remove the wrapping and look inside to discover the hidden splendor. The packages are all alike: in each is a scroll on which is written, “All that the Father hath is thine!” Take and live!—Frank S. Mead 


“May the humility of the shepherds, the perseverance of the wise men, the joy of the angels, and the peace of the Christ Child be God’s gifts to you and yours this Christmastime and always.”—Traditional Moravian blessing 


“I remind myself every morning: Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So if I’m going to learn, I must do it by listening.”—Larry King 


“All who ask receive, those who seek find, and to those who knock it shall be opened. Therefore, let us knock at the beautiful garden of Scripture. It is fragrant, sweet, and blooming with various sounds of spiritual and divinely inspired birds. They sing all around our ears, capture our hearts, comfort the mourners, pacify the angry, and fill us with everlasting joy.”—John of Damascus (675–753) 


“One filled with joy preaches without preaching.”—Mother Teresa 


“People may hear your words, but they feel your attitude.”—John C. Maxwell 


“Ask yourself: Have you been kind today? Make kindness your daily modus operandi and change your world.”—Annie Lennox 


“Turning toward your spouse in the little ways is also the key to long-lasting romance. Many people think that the secret to reconnecting with their partner is a candlelight dinner or a by-the-sea vacation. But the real secret is to turn toward each other in little ways every day.”—John Gottman 


“Why can’t life’s problems hit us when we’re seventeen and know everything?”—A. C. Jolly 


“It’s not what you are that holds you back. It’s what you think you’re not.”—Denis Waitley 


“All travelers, somewhere along the way, find it necessary to check their course, to see how they are doing. We wait until we are sick, or shocked into stillness, before we do the commonplace thing of getting our bearings. And yet, we wonder why we are depressed, why we are unhappy, why we lose our friends, why we are ill-tempered. This condition we pass on to our children, our husbands, our wives, our associates, our friends. Cultivate [checking in]. Linger. ... Who knows? God may whisper to you in the quietness what He has been trying to say to you, oh, for so long a time.”—Howard Thurman 


“My Lord, I have nothing to do in this world, but to seek and serve Thee; I have nothing to do with my heart and its affections, but to breathe after Thee. I have nothing to do with my tongue and pen, but to speak to Thee, and for Thee, and to publish Thy glory and Thy will.”—Richard Baxter 


“Instead of looking for a miracle in your life, look to see if you are the miracle in someone else’s life.”—Nola Rohde Vollmer 


“Will you be satisfied with the fruit of your life’s work? Will the efforts you are making now bring you satisfaction when the things of time are receding and eternity looms ahead?”—Raymond L. Cox 


“If you train your mind to search for the positive things about other people, you will be surprised at how many good things you can observe in them and comment upon.”—Alan Loy McGinnis 


“Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.”—Minna Antrim 


“You are obliged to love your neighbor as yourself, and loving him, you ought to help him spiritually, with prayer, counseling him with words, and assisting him both spiritually and temporally, according to the need in which he may be, at least with your goodwill if you have nothing else.”—Catharine of Siena 


“Dwell in possibility.”—Emily Dickinson 


“To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it.”—Mother Teresa 


Feel glum? Keep mum.

Don’t grumble. Be humble.

Trials cling? Just sing.

Can’t sing? Just cling.

Don’t fear—God’s near!

Money goes—He knows.

Honor left—Not bereft.

Don’t rust—Work! Trust!

   —Ernest Bourner Allen 


“If you can’t be happy where you are, it’s a cinch you can’t be happy where you ain’t.”—Charlie Tremendous Jones 


“The sum of the whole matter is this, that our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually.”—Woodrow Wilson 


“I know God won’t give me more than I can handle. I just wish he didn’t trust me so much.”—Mother Teresa 


“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand.”—Milton Friedman 

November 2020

“Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.”—Phillips Brooks 


For we must share, if we would keep,

That good thing from above;

Ceasing to give, we cease to have;

Such is the law of love.

—Richard Chenevix Trench 


“A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.”—Thomas Carlyle 


“Wisdom is oft-times nearer when we stoop than when we soar.”—William Woodsworth 


“Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we, thine unworthy servants, do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all men. We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all, for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And, we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful; and that we show forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up our selves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost, be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen.”—Book of Common Prayer, 1928 


“The years teach me much which the days never knew.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson 


“There is nothing so fatal to character as half-finished tasks.”—David Lloyd George 


“When Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves, it was not just for our neighbors’ sakes that he commanded it, but for our own sakes as well. Not to help find some way to feed the children who are starving to death is to have some precious part of who we are starve to death with them. Not to give ourselves to the human beings we know who may be starving not for food but for what we have in our hearts to nourish them with is to be, ourselves, diminished and crippled as human beings.”—Frederick Buechner 


“When you come to the edge of all the light you know, and are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing one of two things will happen: there will be something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly.”—Barbara J. Winter 


“The will to win means nothing if you haven’t the will to prepare.”—Juma Ikanhaa 


“The great tragedy of life is not unanswered prayer, but unoffered prayer.”—F. B. Meyer 


“Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start.”—Nido Qubein 


“No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individuality of his rowing.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson 


“Repent and believe in the Gospel, Jesus says. Turn around and believe that the good news that we are loved is gooder than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and toward it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all.”—Frederick Buechner 


“That which you create in beauty and goodness and truth lives on for all time to come. Don’t spend your life accumulating material objects that will only turn to dust and ashes.”—Denis Waitley 


“No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.”—William E. Gladstone 


Don’t assume you’re always going to be understood. I wrote in a column that one should put a cup of liquid in the cavity of a turkey when roasting it. Someone wrote me that “the turkey tasted great, but the plastic cup melted.”—Heloise 


“In the face of unjust criticism we can become bitter or better; upset or understanding; hostile or humble; furious or forgiving.”—William Arthur Ward 


“Mediocrity is a sin. Don’t do your bit; do your best.”—William F. Halsey Jr. 


“I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don’t even invite me.”—Dave Barry 


“If you have a job without aggravations, you don’t have a job.”—Malcolm S. Forbes 


“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.”—Thomas Huxley 


“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”—Yogi Berra 


“Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.”—Percy Bysshe Shelley 


“Inspiration comes of working every day.”—Charles Baudelaire 


“God has two dwellings; one in heaven, and the other in a meek and thankful heart.”—Izaak Walton 


“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”—Groucho Marx 


“True religion is the life we lead, not the creed we profess.”—Author unknown 


“Out of difficulties grow miracles.”—Jean de La Bruyère 


“There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. On one level we may be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship, and a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings.”—Thomas Kelly 

October 2020

“Don't find fault. Find a remedy.”—Henry Ford 


“Jesus taught us to pray for daily bread. Have you ever noticed that children ask for lunch in utter confidence that it will be provided? As far as they are concerned, there is an endless supply of sandwiches. Children do not find it difficult or complicated to talk to their parents, nor do they feel embarrassed to bring the simplest need to their attention. Neither should we hesitate to bring the simplest requests confidently to the Father.”—Richard Foster 


“Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.”—George Bernard Shaw 


“Never close your lips to those to whom you have opened your heart.”—Charles Dickens 


“Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing the monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.”—C. S. Lewis 


“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.”—Thich Nhat Hanh 


“Teach me, Lord, to sing of your mercies. Turn my soul into a garden, where the flowers dance in the gentle breeze, praising you with their beauty. Let my soul be filled with beautiful virtues; let me be inspired by your Holy Spirit; let me praise you always.”—Teresa of Avila 


“It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.”—Benjamin Franklin 


“Something in human nature causes us to start slacking off at our moment of greatest accomplishment. As you become successful, you will need a great deal of self-discipline not to lose your sense of balance, humility and commitment.”—H. Ross Perot 


“You can always find reasons to work. There will always be one more thing to do. But when people don’t take time out, they stop being productive. They stop being happy, and that affects the morale of everyone around them.”—Carisa Bianchi 


“It’s always the rug you’ve been sweeping things under that gets pulled out from under you.”—Author unknown 


“The value of friendly is beyond measure—it costs nothing, yet it’s worth a fortune. And it’s the most contagious disease known to man—catch it.”—Jeffrey Gitomer 


“The best portion of a good man’s life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.”—William Wordsworth 


“One ought to examine himself for a very long time before thinking of condemning others.”—Moliere 


“The circumstances of our lives are another medium of God’s communication with us. God opens some doors and closes others.... The happy coincidences and frustrating impasses of daily life are laden with messages. Patient listening and the grace of the Spirit are the decoding devices of prayer. It is a good habit to ask, What is God saying to me in this situation? Listening is part of prayer.”—Marjorie J. Thompson 


“What we do upon some great occasion will probably depend on what we already are; and what we are will be the result of previous years of self-discipline.”—Henry Parry Liddon 


“Make it a bad moment, not a bad day.”—Katherine Mylius 


“We may not be able to give much but we can always give the joy that springs in a heart that is in love with God.”—Mother Teresa 


“A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”—General George S. Patton 


“Prayer is a participation in willing God’s will.”—Marjorie J. Thompson 


“The poker player learns that sometimes both science and common sense are wrong; that the bumblebee can fly; that, perhaps, one should never trust an expert; that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by those with an academic bent.”—David Mamet 


“Anything I’ve ever done that ultimately was worthwhile initially scared me to death.”—Betty Bender 


“On life’s report card, attitude counts, enthusiasm counts, a commitment to lifelong learning counts, hard work counts, and helping others counts. If you go all-out, you will feel the difference in the quality of your life.”—Steve Lodle 


“The men who did the most for this present world thought the most about the future world.”—C. S. Lewis 


“By perseverance the snail reached the ark.”—Charles Haddon Spurgeon 


“Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many—not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”—Charles Dickens 


“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”—C. S. Lewis 


“Focus on your potential instead of your limitations.”—Alan Loy McGinnis 


“Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.”—Maimonides 


It is strange we go on living our everyday lives—

So carelessly, stumbling, dully we plod

Our commonplace paths, and forget that we walk

Every day, every hour, in the presence of God.

Martha Snell Nicholson 


“Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes. Silently and imperceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or we grow weak, and at last some crisis shows us what we have become.”—Bishop Westcott 

September 2020

“You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, non-apologetically—to say ‘no’ to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger ‘yes’ burning inside. The enemy of the ‘best’ is often the ‘good.’”—Stephen Covey 


“Self-acceptance comes from meeting life’s challenges vigorously. Don’t numb yourself to your trials and difficulties, nor build mental walls to exclude pain from your life. You will find peace not by trying to escape your problems, but by confronting them courageously. You will find peace not in denial, but in victory.”—J. Donald Walters


“Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.”—Phillips Brooks 


“Give me the money that has been spent in war and I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire of which kings and queens will be proud. I will build a schoolhouse in every valley over the whole earth. I will crown every hillside with a place of worship consecrated to peace”—Charles Sumner 


“I don’t think change is stressful. I think failure is stressful.”—Bob Stearns


For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, “It might have been”.—John Greenleaf Whittier 


“Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.”—Benjamin Franklin 


“I do not understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are, but does not leave us where it found us.”—Anne Lamott 


“Teaching kids to count is fine, but teaching them what counts is best.”—Bob Talbert 


“It is sad to see that, in our highly competitive and greedy world, we have lost touch with the joy of giving. We often live as if our happiness depended on having. But I don’t know anyone who is really happy because of what he or she has. True joy, happiness and inner peace come from the giving of ourselves to others. A happy life is a life for others.”—Henri J. M. Nouwen 


“It is not how old you are, but how you are old.”—Jules Renard 


“When you come to the edge of all the light you know, and are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing one of two things will happen: there will be something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly.”—Barbara J. Winter 


“Our Lord asks but two things of us; Love for [God] and for our neighbor. We cannot know whether we love God … but there can be no doubt about whether we love our neighbor or no.”—Teresa of Avila 


“Freedom is the right to be wrong; not the right to do wrong.”—John G. Diefenbaker 


“One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: To rise above the little things.”—John Burroughs 


“Tough times don’t last but tough people do.”—A. C. Green 


“Very often a change of self is needed more than a change of scene.”—Arthur Christopher Benson 


“Strength is the ability to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands—and then eat just one of those pieces.”—Judith Viorst 


“Greatness is not found in possessions, power, position, or prestige. It is discovered in goodness, humility, service, and character.”—William Arthur Ward


“What is the most important thing that you should do right now? It’s easy to figure out the answer—the most important thing is usually the item you least want to do. So jump on it. Get it out of the way. Then go on to the next thing you don’t want to do and get rid of that item by completing it. You’ll be amazed at how it frees your spirit not to have them hanging over you.”—Tom Hopkins


“The heart of all problems, whether economic, political or social, is a human heart.”—L. M. Charles-Edwards 


“Silent gratitude isn’t much good to anyone.”—Gladys Browyn Stern 


“Nothing needs reforming so much as other people’s habits.”—Mark Twain 


“A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”—Alexander Pope 


“Negativity makes a person look at the land of milk and honey and see only calories and cholesterol.”—Harvey Mackay 


“Those who thank God much are the truly wealthy.”—Albert Schweitzer 


“The longer you wait to do something you should do now, the greater the odds that you will never actually do it.”—John Maxwell 


“Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special attention to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstances, are brought into closer connection with you.”—Saint Augustine 


“Give until it hurts, because real love hurts.”—Mother Teresa 


“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.”—Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn 

August 2020

“Technology should improve your life, not become your life.”—Harvey Mackay 


“A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken.”—James Dent 


“Do first things first, and second things not at all.”—Peter Drucker 


“A life lived with integrity—even if it lacks the trappings of fame and fortune—is a shining star in whose light others may follow in the years to come.”—Denis Waitley 


“Humor is tragedy plus time.”—Mark Twain 


“Somewhere out there is a unique place for you to help others—a unique life role for you to fill that only you can fill.”—Thomas Kinkade 


“To every person there comes a time when he is tapped on the shoulder to do a very special thing unique to him. What a tragedy if that moment finds him unprepared for the work that would be his finest hour.”—Winston Churchill 


“Remember that the six most expensive words in business are: ‘We’ve always done it that way.’”—Catherine DeVrye 


“Sometimes people say unkind or thoughtless things, and when they do, it is best to be a little hard of hearing—to tune out and not snap back in anger or impatience.”—Ruth Bader Ginsburg 


“Do more than you are paid for. There are never any traffic jams on the extra mile.”—Brian Tracy 


“Most of us tend to suffer from ‘agenda anxiety’—the feeling that what we want to say to others is more important than what we think they might want to say to us.”—Nido Qubein 


“People who consider themselves victims of their circumstances will always remain victims unless they develop a greater vision for their lives.”—Stedman Graham


“Never take counsel of your fears.”—Andrew Jackson 


“The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.”—Muhammad Ali 


“Give according to your income, lest God make your income according to your giving.”—Unknown


“As long as we think we are not that bad, the idea of grace will never change us.”—Tim Keller 


“If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother and hope your guardian genius.”—Joseph Addison 


“No man ever became great or good except through many and great mistakes.”—William E. Gladstone 


“Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence.”—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 


“An egotist is not a man who thinks too much of himself. He is a man who thinks too little of other people.”—J. F. Newton


“We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.”—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 


“One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.”—Eleanor Roosevelt 


“Let us labor to make the heart grow larger as we become older, as the spreading oak gives more shelter.”—[John] Richard Jefferies 


“No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut.”—Sam Rayburn


My mind is a garden.

My thoughts are the seeds.

My harvest will be either flowers or weeds.

—Mel Weldon 


“You can conquer almost any fear if you will make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.”—Dale Carnegie 


“Never do something permanently foolish just because you are temporarily upset.”—Terry Crews 


“People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.”—Yuval Noah Harari 


“Sometimes faith seems like a denial of reality, but that’s because we’re holding on to a reality that is more real than the reality we can perceive with our five senses.”—Mark Batterson


“Ability is important in our quest for success, but dependability is critical.”—Zig Ziglar 

July 2020

“If you look at the world, you’ll be distressed. If you look within, you’ll be depressed. If you look to Christ, you’ll be at rest.”—Corrie ten Boom


“Life is a series of sales situations, and the answer is NO if you don’t ask.”—Patricia Fripp 


“We must meet the uncertainties of this world with the certainty of the world to come.”—A. W. Tozer 


“Good work done little by little becomes great work. Your house of success will be built brick by brick.”—Max Steingart 


“Reputation is character minus what you’ve been caught doing.”—Michael Lapoce


“Forever is composed of nows.”—Emily Dickinson


“If you’re angry with a loved one, hug that person. And mean it. You may not want to hug—which is all the more reason to do so. It’s hard to stay angry when someone shows they love you, and that’s precisely what happens when we hug each other.”—Walter Anderson


“The battles that count aren't the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself—the invisible battles inside all of us—that's where it's at.”—Jesse Owens


Deep peace of the running wave to you.

Deep peace of the flowing air to you.

Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.

Deep peace of the shining stars to you.

Deep peace of the gentle night to you.

Moon and stars pour their healing light on you.

Deep peace of Christ, the light of the world to you.

—John Rutter, arrangement of a Gaelic blessing


“The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.”—Eric Hoffer


“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”—C. S. Lewis


“There is abundant testimony that if we choose love rather than self, we gain immeasurably.”—Federico Fellini


“I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. Some of these young men think that war is all glory, but let me say war is all hell.”—William Tecumseh Sherman


“Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.”—Attributed to C. S. Lewis


“Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.”—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg 


“Every man is a fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limits.”—Elbert Hubbard


“Let no man turn aside, ever so slightly, from the broad path of honour, on the plausible pretence that he is justified by the goodness of his end. All good ends can be worked out by good means.”—Charles Dickens 


“We either make ourselves happy or miserable. The amount of work is the same.”—Carlos Castaneda 


“Sometimes when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things. I am tempted to think there are no little things.”—Bruce Barton 


“The human heart refuses to believe in a universe without a purpose.”—Immanuel Kant


“It is inevitable that some defeat will enter even the most victorious life. The human spirit is never finished when it is defeated—it is finished when it surrenders.”—Ben Stein


“No doesn’t always mean no; sometimes no means not yet. We’re too quick to give up on God when He doesn’t answer our prayers when we want or how we want. Maybe your deadline doesn’t fit God’s timeline. Maybe no simply means not yet. Maybe it’s a divine delay.”—Mark Batterson


“Stewardship is the act of organizing your life so God can spend you.”—Lynn Miller


“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.”—Soren Kierkegaard


“Yesterday’s success formula is often today’s obsolete dogma. We must continually challenge the past so that we can renew ourselves each day.”—Sumantra Ghoshal


“Some day, in years to come, you will be wrestling with the great temptation, or trembling under the great sorrow of your life. But the real struggle is here, now, in these quiet weeks. Now it is being decided whether, in the day of your supreme sorrow or temptation, you shall miserably fail or gloriously conquer. Character cannot be made except by a steady, long continued process.”—Phillips Brooks


“Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”—George Orwell


“Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.”—Ovid


“How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things, but how well we are understood.”—Andrew Grove


“If criticism is mistaken or mean-spirited, rise above it. Maintain the high ground when you’re under fire. No victory is worth winning at the expense of picking up the mud that has been slung at you and throwing it back.”—Rubel Shelly


“You can’t have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time.”—Charles F. Kettering

June 2020

“A pessimist, they say, sees a glass of water as being half-empty; an optimist sees the same glass as half-full. But a giving person sees a glass of water and starts looking for someone who might be thirsty.”—G. Donald Gale


“You only lose energy when life becomes dull in your mind. Your mind gets bored and therefore tired of doing nothing. Get interested in something! Get absolutely enthralled in something! Get out of yourself! Be somebody! Do something! The more you lose yourself in something bigger than yourself, the more energy you will have.”—Norman Vincent Peale


“Just as the body cannot exist without blood, so the soul needs the matchless and pure strength of faith.”—Mahatma Gandhi


“Don’t water your weeds.”—Harvey Mackay


“One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.”—Lewis Mumford


“Right is right, even if everyone is against it; and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.”—William Penn


“Life affords no greater responsibility, no greater privilege, than the raising of the next generation.”—C. Everett Koop


“The art of living lies less in eliminating our troubles than in growing with them.”—Bernard M. Baruch


“He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.”—Henry Ward Beecher


“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”—Wayne Gretzky


“If you’re coasting, you’re either losing momentum or else you’re headed downhill.”—Joan Welsh


“As I look back at my life, it is easy to see that the times when my wisdom and understanding grew to new levels; those times when I approached becoming the person I long to be; it was always the times that followed negative circumstances.”—Vic Johnson


“Always do right! This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”—Mark Twain


“It is never too late to be who you might have been.”—George Eliot


“A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him.”—David Brinkley


“Never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved.”—Barbara Johnson


“Be humble or you’ll stumble.”—Dwight Moody


“Old age is like climbing a mountain. You climb from ledge to ledge. The higher you get, the more tired and breathless you become—but your views become more extensive.”—Ingrid Bergman


“May I forget what ought to be forgotten; and recall, unfailing, all that ought to be recalled, each kindly thing, forgetting what might sting.”—Mary Carolyn Davies


“Do more than belong: participate. Do more than care: help. Do more than believe: practice. Do more than be fair: be kind. Do more than forgive: forget. Do more than dream: work.”—William Arthur Ward


“Treat your body like a temple, not a woodshed. The mind and body work together. Your body needs to be a good support system for the mind and spirit. If you take good care of it, your body can take you wherever you want to go, with the power and strength and energy and vitality you will need to get there.”—Jim Rohn


“Some people feel the rain, others just get wet.”—Bob Dylan


“You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.”—Alan Watts


“We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday’s burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it.”—John Newton


“I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.”—Stephen Covey


“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”—Martin Luther King Jr.


“Opportunities are like sunrises—if you wait too long, you miss them.”—William Arthur Ward


“There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing.”—Brian Tracy


“Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“Kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve.”—Joseph Joubert

May 2020

“Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don’t fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.”—Jim Rohn


“The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.”—Thomas Paine


God gave you a gift of 86,400 seconds today. Have you used one to say “thank you?”—William Arthur Ward


“Every day holds the possibility of a miracle.”—Elizabeth David


“I have need to busy my heart with quietude.”—Rupert Brooke


“This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess.”—Rainer Maria Rilke


“We become what we think about.”—Earl Nightingale


“His love in times past forbids me to think he’ll leave me at last in troubles to sink.”—John Newton


“More things are wrought by prayer. Than this world dreams of.”—Alfred Lord Tennyson


“The one resolution, which was in my mind long before it took the form of a resolution, is the keynote of my life. It is this, always to regard as mere impertinences of fate the handicaps which were placed upon my life almost at the beginning. I resolved that they should not crush or dwarf my soul, but rather be made to blossom, like Aaron’s rod, with flowers.”—Helen Keller


“When you were born, you cried and everybody else was happy. The only question that matters is this: When you die, will you be happy when everybody else is crying?”—Tony Campolo


“There aren’t any great men. There are just great challenges that ordinary men like you and me are forced by circumstances to meet.”—William F. Halsey


“Life expectancy would grow by leaps and bounds if green vegetables smelled as good as bacon.”—Doug Larson


“We must all wage an intense, lifelong battle against the constant downward pull. If we relax, the bugs and weeds of negativity will move into the garden and take away everything of value.”—Jim Rohn


“Love and kindness are never wasted. They always make a difference. They bless the one who receives them, and they bless you, the giver.”—Barbara De Angelis


“Don’t just be a Christian as if ‘Christian’ is some assigned label that you are simply stuck with forever, an identity that means nothing to you. No, take all of your life to become a Christian: choose, again and again with each new day, to be a real self, an authentic person in relation to God. Abandon your calculated safety for a reckless, wholehearted life of faith in Christ. Continue to become. Grow. Risk. Take that radical leap of faith, right now.”—Soren Kierkegaard


“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”—Harper Lee


“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”—Epictetus


“But I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that I am grateful.”—Elizabeth Edwards


“When we long for life without difficulties, remind us that oaks grow strong in contrary winds and diamonds are made under pressure.”—Peter Marshal


“To speak gratitude is courteous and pleasant, to enact gratitude is generous and noble, but to live gratitude is to touch Heaven.”—Johannes A. Gaertner


“Difficulties are things that show what men are.”—Epictetus


“Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.”—Malcolm Forbes


“Many who seem to be struggling with adversity are happy; many, amid great affluence, are utterly miserable.”—Tacitus


“Love means to love that which is unlovable, or it is no virtue at all; forgiving means to pardon that which is unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all.”—G. K. Chesterton


“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.”—Robert Louis Stevenson


“No one has ever become poor by giving.”—Anne Frank


“Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to our eyes. Silently and imperceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or weak; and at last, some crisis shows what we have become.”—Brooke Foss Westcott


“It is not your customer’s job to remember you; it is your obligation and responsibility to make sure they don’t have the chance to forget you.”—Patricia Fripp


“Each day we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.”—Charles Swindoll


“A good plan violently executed right now is far better than a perfect plan executed next week.”—General George Patton

April 2020

“For every minute you are angry, you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“The glory of friendship is not in the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is in the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“It’s not what happens to you, it’s what happens in you that’s going to make a difference.”—John Maxwell


“To love what you do, and feel that it matters. How could anything else be more fun?”—Katharine Graham


“The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reasons for remaining ashore.”—Vincent Van Gogh


“A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.”—Charles Evans Hughes


“Great opportunities to help others seldom come, but small ones surround us every day.”—Sally Koch


“You can never learn that Christ is all you need until Christ is all you have.”―Corrie ten Boom


“The true man is revealed in difficult times. So when trouble comes, think of yourself as a wrestler whom God, like a trainer, has paired with a tough young buck. For what purpose? To turn you into Olympic-class material. But this is going to take some sweat to accomplish. From my perspective, no one’s difficulties ever gave him a better test than yours, if you are prepared to make use of them the way a wrestler makes use of an opponent in peak condition.”—Epictetus


“Whenever you see darkness, there is extraordinary opportunity for the light to burn brighter.”—Bono


Coincidence is when God chooses to remain anonymous.—Unknown


“In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit.”—Anne Frank


“When something bad happens you have three choices. You can either let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.”—Dr. Seuss


“Four short words sum up what has lifted most successful individuals above the crowd: a little bit more. They did all that was expected of them and a little bit more.”—A. Lou Vickery


“Simply seek happiness, and you are not likely to find it. Seek to create and love without regard to your happiness, and you will likely be happy much of the time.”—M. Scott Peck


“Hearing is one of the body’s five senses. But listening is an art.”—Frank Tyger


We ought daily to renew our vows, and to kindle our hearts to zeal, as if each day were the first day of our conversion, and to say, “Help me, O God, in my good resolutions, and in Thy holy service, and grant that this day I may make a good beginning, for hitherto I have done nothing!”—From “The Imitation Of Christ” by Thomas a Kempis


“Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.”—Anne Frank


“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”—C. S. Lewis


“To know the Word of God, to live the Word of God, to preach the Word, to teach the Word, is the sum of all wisdom, the heart of all Christian service.”—Charles E. Fuller


“Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.”—Dalai Lama


“Nothing is permanent in this wicked world. Not even our troubles.”—Charlie Chaplin


“Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.”—Henry David Thoreau


“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass… It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”—Vivian Greene


“No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that’s going to happen.”—Alan Watts


“Any man's life will be filled with constant and unexpected encouragement if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day.”—Booker T. Washington


“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”—J. R. R. Tolkien


“It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.”—Abigail Adams


“Rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing instant in prayer.”—Romans 12:12


“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”—James Stockdale

March 2020

“If all you did was just looked for things to appreciate, you would live a joyously spectacular life.”―Esther Abraham Hicks


“Our notion of sacrifice is the wringing out of us something we don’t want to give up, full of pain and agony and distress. The Bible idea of sacrifice is that I give as a love-gift the very best thing I have.”—Oswald Chambers


“Generosity isn’t an act. It’s a way of life.”—Chip Ingram


“Courage isn't having the strength to go on—it is going on when you don't have strength.”—Napoleon Bonaparte


“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”—George Bernard Shaw


“It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one’s neighbor.”—Eric Hoffer


“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”—Fred Rogers


“The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.”—Frederick Buechner


“Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.”—Booker T. Washington


“No man can always be right. So the struggle is to do one’s best, to keep the brain and conscience clear, never to be swayed by unworthy motives or inconsequential reasons, but to strive to unearth the basic factors involved, then do one’s duty.”—Dwight D. Eisenhower


“‘Tis easy enough to be pleasant, when life flows along like a song; but the person worthwhile is the one who will smile when everything goes dead wrong.”—Ella Wheeler Wilcox


“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.”—Bill Gates


“Life is a grindstone. But whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us.”—L. Thomas Holdcraft


“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.”—Socrates


“Life is relationships; the rest is just details.”—Gary Smalley


“We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter’s evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light, which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.”—Woodrow T. Wilson


“We can't help everyone, but everyone can help someone.”—Michael Jordan


“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”—Jack London


“Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen.”—Peter Marshall


“The work of today is the history of tomorrow, and we are its makers.”—Juliette Gordon Low


“It’s not what you do once in a while; it’s what you do day in and day out that makes the difference.”—Jenny Craig


“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”—Marcus Aurelius


“You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world’s happiness now. How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to someone who is lonely or discouraged. Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words you say today, but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime.”—Dale Carnegie


“To admit you were wrong is to declare you are wiser now than before.”—Unknown


“Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see it’s what you would have wanted had you known.”—Garrison Keillor


“The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.”—Havelock Ellis


“Many times, when I was having a hard time with one of my children, God would always remind me that He was having a harder time with me than I was with them.”—Charlie “Tremendous” Jones


“Many people have the ambition to succeed; they may even have special aptitude for their job. And yet they do not move ahead. Why? Perhaps they think that since they can master the job, there is no need to master themselves.”—John Stevenson


“As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“Hard work has made it easy. That is my secret. That is why I win.”—Nadia Comaneci

February 2020

“Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself, and all things possible.”—Thomas a Kempis


“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”—John F. Kennedy


“He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he had tried and failed.”—William James


“Truth and love are two of the most powerful things in the world; and when they both go together they cannot easily be withstood.”—Ralph Cudworth


“It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing. It is not how much we give, but how much love we put in the giving.”—Mother Teresa


“There is nothing wrong with making mistakes. Just don’t respond with encores.”—Author unknown


“A true friend knows your weaknesses but shows you your strengths; feels your fears but fortifies your faith; sees your anxieties but frees your spirit; recognizes your disabilities but emphasizes your possibilities.”—William Arthur Ward


“Heaven is full of answers to prayer for which no one bothered to ask.”—Billy Graham


“The future is given shape by our faith, or condemned to drift and disaster by our indifference.”—Page Smith


“Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know Plato and Aristotle—Einstein’s theory—the second law of thermodynamics—you only need a heart full of grace; a soul generated by love.”—Martin Luther King Jr.


“This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.”—Rainer Maria Rilke


“Always demanding the best of oneself, living with honor, devoting one’s talents and gifts to the benefits of others—these are the measures of success that endure when material things have passed away.”—Gerald Ford


“To be a good loser is to learn how to win.”—Carl Sandburg


“When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.”—Helen Keller


“Better to fight for something than live for nothing.”—General George Patton


“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”—G. K. Chesterton


“Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out.”—Art Linkletter


“Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There’s plenty of movement, but you never know if it’s going to be forward, backwards, or sideways.”—H. Jackson Brown, Jr.


“The most successful people are those who are good at Plan B.”—James Yorke


“Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still.”—Frederick William Faber


“Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.”—Sir Winston Churchill


“We probably wouldn’t worry about what other people think of us if we could know how seldom they do.”—Olin Miller


“Every evening, I turn worries over to God. He’s going to be up all night anyway.”—Mary C. Crowley


I heard a bird sing

In the dark of December;

A magnificent thing

And sweet to remember:

“We are nearer to spring

Than we were in September.”

I heard a bird sing

In the dark of December.

      —Oliver Herford


“Just as an oak tree grows from a little acorn so does great character grow from a great many decisions that may at the time seem very minor.”—Ben M. Herbster


“A life without purpose is a languid, drifting thing; every day we ought to review our purpose, saying to ourselves: This day let me make a sound beginning, for what we have hitherto done is naught!”—Thomas a Kempis


“Day by day, nothing seems to change. But pretty soon, everything’s different.”—Bill Watterson


“Always err on the side of doing right. You and only you are responsible for your ethics.”—Griffin Bell


“If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.”—Mother Teresa

January 2020

“My days of whining and complaining about others have come to an end. Nothing is easier than fault-finding. All it will do is discolor my personality so that none will want to associate with me. That was my old life. No more.”—Og Mandino


There is no such thing as a “spiritual blowout” in the Christian life. It all begins with a series of small, imperceptible leaks in the linings of our character.—Charles Swindoll


“Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.”—Alice Walker


“Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.”—Thomas Merton


“If you make it plain you like people, it’s hard for them to resist liking you back.”—Lois McMaster Bujold


“Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.”—Arthur Ashe


“Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.”—Lyndon B. Johnson


“It seems rather incongruous that in a society of super sophisticated communication, we often suffer from a shortage of listeners.”—Erma Bombeck


“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”—Leo Tolstoy


“The reason most people fail instead of succeed is they trade what they want most for what they want at the moment.”—Napoleon Bonaparte


“One day man's wisdom will come not out of books but from the presence of the living God, and our Earth will glow brighter than the sun, and there will be no more sadness.”—Fyodor Dostoyevsky


“A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence.”—James Watkins


“A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.”—Franklin Roosevelt


“Men have succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the world has grown less.”—Fyodor Dostoyevsky


“There are at least a billion people in this world who’ll consider their prayers answered if they could switch places with you.”—Sam Harris


“When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.”—attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”—Martin Luther King Jr.


“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”—Albert Einstein


“Slow but steady wins the race.”—Aesop


“A good marriage is one in which each spouse secretly thinks he or she got the better deal, and this is true also of our friendships.”—Anne Lamott


“The true test of intelligence is not how much you know how to do, it’s how you behave when you don’t know what to do.”—John Holt


“Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.”—Peter Marshall


“He conquers who endures.”—Persius


“Faith is the courage to accept acceptance, to accept that God loves me as I am and not as I should be, because I’m never going to be as I should be.”—Paul Tillich


“Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight.”—Helen Keller


“You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“If a commission by an earthly king is considered an honor, how can a commission by a Heavenly King be considered a sacrifice?”—David Livingstone


“We need to find God, and He cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature—trees, flowers, grass—grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence. We need silence to be able to touch souls.”—Mother Teresa


“Life is inherently risky. There is only one big risk you should avoid at all costs, and that is the risk of doing nothing.”—Denis Waitley


“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.”—Norman Macewen

December 2019

“The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul.”—G. K. Chesterton


“A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees.”—Amelia Earhart


“One can give without loving, but one cannot love without giving.”—Amy Carmichael


“You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.”—Adoniram Judson


“There are no closed doors to the Gospel—provided that, once you get inside, you don’t care if you ever come out.”—Brother Andrew


“Anywhere, provided it be forward.”—David Livingstone


There was a gift to each of us left under the tree of life 2000 years ago by Him whose birthday we celebrate today. The gift was withheld from no man. Some have left the packages unclaimed. Some have accepted the gift and carried it around, but have failed to remove the wrapping and look inside to discover the hidden splendor. The packages are all alike: in each is a scroll on which is written, “All that the Father hath is thine!” Take and live!—Frank S. Mead


Christmas is not the tinsel and lights and outward show…

The secret lies in an inner glow.

It’s lighting a fire inside the heart…

Good will and joy a vital part.

It’s higher thought and a greater plan.

It’s a glorious dream in the soul of man.

Christmas begins deep down inside…

Then engulfs the world like a mighty tide!

—Wilfred A. Peterson


“My idea of Christmas, whether old-fashioned or modern, is very simple: loving others. Come to think of it, why do we have to wait for Christmas to do that?”—Bob Hope


“Christmas is not as much about opening our presents as opening our hearts.”—Janice Maeditere


“Peace on earth will come to stay, 

When we live Christmas every day.”

—Helen Steiner Rice


“It is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.”—Charles Dickens


“Every time we love, every time we give, it’s Christmas.”—Dale Evans Rogers


I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year.—Charles Dickens


“Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.”—C. S. Lewis


“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”—Theodore Roosevelt


“Youth is not a period of time. It is a state of mind, a result of the will, a quality of the imagination, a victory of courage over timidity, of the taste for adventure over the love of comfort. A man doesn’t grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deserts his ideal. The years may wrinkle his skin, but deserting his ideal wrinkles his soul. Preoccupations, fears, doubts, and despair are the enemies which slowly bow us toward earth and turn us into dust before death. You will remain young as long as you are open to what is beautiful, good, and great; receptive to the messages of other men and women, of nature, and of God.”—Gen. Douglas MacArthur


Christ wants not nibblers of the possible, but grabbers of the impossible, by faith in the omnipotence, fidelity, and wisdom of the Almighty Savior who gave the command. Is there a wall in our path? By our God we will leap over it! Are there lions and scorpions in our way? We will trample them under our feet! Does a mountain bar our progress? Saying, “Be thou cast into the sea,” we will march on. Soldiers of Jesus! Never surrender!—C. T. Studd


God uses men who are weak and feeble enough to lean on Him.—Hudson Taylor


“Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.”—Theodore Roosevelt


“Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life; not a philosophy of life, but a life and living process.”—Samuel Taylor Coleridge


“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.”—Woodrow Wilson


“Growth is painful. Change is painful. But nothing is as painful as staying stuck somewhere you don’t belong.”—Mandy Hale


“If you’ve made a habit of communing with God when the sun is shining, you’ll find it much easier to sing in the rain.”—Bill Pannell


“Someday is not a day of the week.”—Unknown


“I always wondered why somebody didn’t do something about that, then I realized I was somebody.”—Lily Tomlin


“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak, it’s also what it takes to sit down and listen.”—Winston Churchill


“Life is all about choices. How many people are trapped in their everyday habits: part numb, part frightened, part indifferent? To have a better life we must keep choosing how we’re living.”—Albert Einstein


“Accept the challenges, so that you may feel the exhilaration of victory.”—General George Patton


“The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.”—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin


“As long as you’re green, you’re growing. As soon as you’re ripe, you start to rot.”—Ray Kroc

November 2019

“Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start.”—Nido Qubein


“You don’t have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. But you do have to know the few great things that matter, perhaps just one, and then be willing to live for them and die for them. The people that make a durable difference in the world are not the people who have mastered many things, but who have been mastered by one great thing.”—John Piper


“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”—John Fitzgerald Kennedy


“Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do.”—Pele


“It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.”—Andrew J. Holmes


If I knew you and you knew me,

If both of us could clearly see,

And with an inner sight divine

The meaning of your heart and mine,

I’m sure that we would differ less,

And clasp our hands in friendliness;

Our thoughts would pleasantly agree

If I knew you and you knew me.

—Nixon Waterman


“If you hug to yourself any resentment against anybody else, you destroy the bridge by which God would come to you.”—Peter Marshall


“Go to the effort. Invest the time. Write the letter. Make the apology. Take the trip. Purchase the gift. Do it. The seized opportunity renders joy. The neglected brings regret.”—Max Lucado


O, blessed is that man of whom some soul can say,

“He was an inspiration along life’s toilsome way,

A well of sparkling water, a fountain flowing free,

Forever like his Master, in tenderest sympathy.”

—Unknown


“One thing I am convinced more and more is true and that is this: The only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect.”—William Carlos Williams


“Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”—C. S. Lewis


“By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy—indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self-satisfaction.”—William Osler


“It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.”―J. K. Rowling


“Not what we say about our blessings, but how we use them, is the true measure of our thanksgiving.”—W. T. Purkiser


“That which we are, we are all the while teaching, not voluntarily, but involuntarily.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.” —C. S. Lewis


Stand upright, speak thy thought, declare

The truth thou hast that all may share;

Be bold, proclaim it everywhere;

They only live who dare.

—Lewis Morris 


“Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.”—C. S. Lewis


“Unselfish and noble actions are the most radiant pages in the biography of souls.”—David Thomas


“The unthankful heart ... discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings!”—Henry Ward Beecher


“A man of courage flees forward in the midst of new things.”—Jacques Maritain


Grow old along with me!

The best is yet to be,

The last of life, for which the first was made;

Our times are in His hand

Who saith, “A whole I planned,

Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!”

—Robert Browning


“A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.”—Joseph Campbell


“Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grow flowers, not thunder.”—Rumi


“Courage does not always roar. Sometimes it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, I will try again tomorrow.”—Mary Anne Radmacher


“There is someone that I love even though I don’t approve of what he does. There is someone I accept though some of his thoughts and actions revolt me. There is someone I forgive though he hurts the people I love the most. That person is … me.”—C. S. Lewis


“Don’t be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?”—Marcus Aurelius


“Every Christian has his own particular bit of Christ’s radiance and Christ’s fragrance which God would pass through him to others. God has given you a particular kind of personality. He has also created a particular circle of individuals who can be reached and touched by that personality as by none other in the world. And then He shapes and orders your life so as to bring you into contact with that very circle.”—James H. McConkey


“One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.”—John Stuart Mill


“It is not enough to know, we must also apply; it is not enough to will, we must also do.”—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

October 2019

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”—Maya Angelou


“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.”—Albert Einstein


Lord, give me eyes that I may see, lest I as people will,

Should pass someone’s Calvary and think it just a hill.

—Unknown


“Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.”—Pope John Paul XXIII


“We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience.”—George Washington


“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.”—Ernest Hemingway


“The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen, but are to be lived.”—S. Kierkegaard


“Always remember that the future comes one day at a time.”—Dean Acheson


“Difficulties increase the nearer we come to our aim.”—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”—C. S. Lewis


“Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off with you having tried.”—Tim O’Reilly


“One need only grow old to become gentler in one’s judgments. I see no fault committed which I could not have committed myself.”—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“For many people, change is more threatening than challenging. They see it as the destroyer of what is familiar and comfortable rather than the creator of what is new and exciting.”—Nido Qubein


“Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within the reach of every hand.”—Mother Teresa


“The future starts today, not tomorrow.”—Pope John Paul II


“Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.”—Sophia Loren


“It is a great error to take oneself for more than one is, or for less than one is worth.”—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“One cannot help being old, but one can resist being aged.”—Lord Samuel


“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.”—Beverly Sills


“Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.”—Sydney J. Harris


“You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.”—Margaret Thatcher


“Being happy doesn’t mean everything is perfect. It means you have decided to look beyond the imperfections.”—Gerard Way


“If you don’t stick to your values when they’re being tested, they’re not values: they’re hobbies.”—Jon Stewart


“Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time’ is like saying ‘I don’t want to.'”—Lao Tzu


“Happy the man who improves other people not only when he is in their presence but even when he is in their thoughts.”—Seneca


“It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.”—Benjamin Franklin


“To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.”—Aldous Huxley


“Sometimes your only available transportation is a leap of faith.”—Margaret Shepherd


“No one ever said on their deathbed, ‘Gee, I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer.’”—Danielle Berry


“Feeling sorry for yourself, and your present condition, is not only a waste of energy but the worst habit you could possibly have.”—Dale Carnegie


“Very often a change of self is needed more than a change of scene.”—Arthur Christopher Benson

September 2019

“With integrity, you have nothing to fear, since you have nothing to hide. With integrity, you will do the right thing, so you will have no guilt.”—Zig Ziglar


“An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.”—Tara Westover


“What you do today can change the course of your life far into the future. Today is critical. Today really counts.”—Ralph S. Marston, Jr.


“So many people spend so much of their life energy “sweating the small stuff” that they completely lose touch with the magic and beauty of life.”—Richard Carlson


“Christianity is realistic because it says that if there is no truth, there is also no hope.”—Francis A. Schaeffer


“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.”—Mark Twain


“Speak to your children as if they are the wisest, kindest, most beautiful, and magical humans on earth. For what they believe is what they will become.”—Brooke Hampton


“Do not say you don’t have time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein and Mother Teresa.”—Jackson Brown


“Nothing is impossible; there are ways that lead to everything, and if we had sufficient will we should always have sufficient means. It is often merely for an excuse that we say things are impossible.”—Francois de La Rochefoucauld


“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”—Niels Bohr


“All God’s giants have been weak men, who did great things for God because they believed that God would be with them.”—Hudson Taylor


“The pain passes, but the beauty remains.”—Pierre Auguste Renoir


“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”—Former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki


“Efficiency comes from making progress on your to-do list. Growth comes from moving forward on your to-be list.”—Adam Grant


“When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me.’”—Erma Bombeck


“Just keep going. Everybody gets better if they keep at it.”—Ted Williams


There are no closed doors to the Gospel—provided that, once you get inside, you don’t care if you ever come out.—Brother Andrew


“I’ve studied carefully and prayerfully some who are remarkably faithful and effective witnesses of the Savior and His Church. There is no single pattern in what they do. There is no common technique. Each has prayed to know what to do. They each seem to get a different answer, suited especially to them and to the people they meet. Pray for the chance to encounter people who sense there could be something better in their lives. Pray to know what you should do to help them. Your prayers will be answered.”—Henry B. Eyring


“Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.”—Robert Louis Stevenson


“We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.”—Mother Teresa


“Don’t wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and make them great!”—O. S. Marden


“If you love someone, everything is negotiable. If you don’t, everything is a door.”—Carrie Fisher


“If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself!”—Eubie Blake


“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”—Malcolm X


“Don’t judge a man by where he is, because you don’t know how far he has come.”—C. S. Lewis


“There are things that only you can do, and you are alive to do them. In the great orchestra we call life, you have an instrument and a song, and you owe it to God to play them both sublimely.”—Max Lucado


“If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that it may be said to possess him.”—Francis Bacon


“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”—Martin Luther


“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.”—Henry Ford


“The best way out is always through.”—Robert Frost

August 2019

“We climb to heaven most often on the ruins of our cherished plans, finding our failures were successes.”—Amos Bronson Alcott


“Let no one come to you without leaving better and happier.”—Mother Teresa


“Govern thy life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one, and read the other.”—Thomas Fuller


“Let him that would move the world first move himself.”—Socrates


“Every genuine expression of love grows out of a consistent and total surrender to God.”—Martin Luther King Jr.


“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”—G. K. Chesterton


“Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.”—David Star Jordan


“[T]he taxes are indeed very heavy, and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might more easily discharge them; but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly; and from these taxes the commissioners cannot ease or deliver us by allowing an abatement.”—Benjamin Franklin


“Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?”—Marcus Aurelius


“Live as though you’re living a second time and as though the first time you lived, you did it wrong, and now you’re trying to do things right.”—Viktor Frankl


“Do not wait; the time will never be 'just right.' Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.”—George Herbert


“Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.”—Thomas Carlyle


“Not facing a fire doesn’t put it out.”—Tennessee Williams


“The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.”—Sydney Harris


“Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open.”—George Bernard Shaw


“The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But ... the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”—Martin Luther King, Jr. 


“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”—Henry David Thoreau


“Live as you will wish to have lived when you are dying.”—Christian Gellert


“The greatness of a man can nearly always be measured by his willingness to be kind.”—G. Young


“Accept the challenges so that you can feel the exhilaration of victory.”— George S. Patton


“We can’t be afraid of change. You may feel very secure in the pond that you are in, but if you never venture out of it, you will never know that there is such a thing as an ocean, a sea. Holding onto something that is good for you now, may be the very reason why you don’t have something better.”—C. JoyBell C


“It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.”—Eleanor Roosevelt


“You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.”—Toni Morrison


“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”—Mignon McLaughlin


“It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.”—Lena Horne


“I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.”—Og Mandino


“You can do anything, but not everything.”—David Allen


“We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon—instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.”—Dale Carnegie


“Anywhere, provided it be forward.”—David Livingstone


“Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.”—Mark Twain


“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.”—Jonathan Swift

July 2019

“It is never too late to give up your prejudices.”—Henry David Thoreau


“When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.”—Thomas Szasz


“Faith is a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty.”—Brene Brown


Love much. There is no waste in freely giving;

More blessed is it, even, than to receive.

He who loves much, alone finds life worth living;

Love on, through doubt and darkness; and believe

There is nothing which Love may not achieve.

—Ella Wheeler Wilcox


“Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes.”—Zig Ziglar


Before God’s footstool to confess

A poor soul knelt and bowed his head.

“I failed,” he wailed.

The Master said, “Thou did’st thy best—that is success.”

—Henry Coyle


“A belief is something you will argue about. A conviction is something you will die for.”—Howard Hendricks


“Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.”—Will Rogers


“To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.”—Walt Whitman


“The truth is that there is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else. The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self.”—Whitney Young


“Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away.”—Arthur Helps


“Aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been.”—David Bowie


“The difference between where you are and where God wants you to be may be the painful decision you refuse to make.”—Craig Groeschel


“Today is the first day of your life because it has never been before, and today is the last day of your life because it will never be again.”—Frederick Buechner


“Don't wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and make them great.”—Orison Swett Marden


“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”—Jane Goodall


“Life is not a spectator sport. If you're going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you're wasting your life.”—Jackie Robinson


“Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody.”—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


“Leadership is not about titles, positions, or flow charts. It is about one life influencing another.”—John C. Maxwell


“Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you don’t listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won’t tell you the big stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff.”—Catherine M. Wallace


“The sanest people, I think, are those happily unafflicted with ambition—whether for power, wealth, fame or achievement—who want only to work at some useful job, to love someone and to live in a nice place with some wind chimes on the porch.”—Tim Kreider


“Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.”—Michael Jordan


“The true price of anything you do is the amount of time you exchange for it.”―Henry David Thoreau


“Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire.”—François de La Rochefoucauld


“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”—Mark Twain


“Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.”—Og Mandino


“The future is not some place we are going to but one we are creating. The paths to it are not found but made.”—John Schaar


There never was a time when, in my opinion, some way could not be found to prevent the drawing of the sword.—Ulysses S. Grant


“If you’re still hanging onto a dead dream of yesterday, laying flowers on its grave by the hour, you cannot be planting the seeds for a new dream to grow today.”—Joyce Chapman


“We may not be able to give much but we can always give the joy that springs in a heart that is in love with God.”—Mother Teresa


“Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan.”—Tom Landry

June 2019

“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”—John F. Kennedy


“What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.”—Albert Pine


“Laughter is to life what shock absorbers are to automobiles: It won’t take the potholes out of the road, but it sure makes the ride smoother.”—Barbara Johnson


“What kind of man would live where there is no daring? I don’t believe in taking foolish chances, but nothing can be accomplished without taking any chance at all.”—Charles A. Lindbergh


“Truth and love are two of the most powerful things in the world; and when they both go together they cannot easily be withstood.”—Ralph Cudworth


“A true friend knows your weaknesses but shows you your strengths; feels your fears but fortifies your faith; sees your anxieties but frees your spirit; recognizes your disabilities but emphasizes your possibilities.”—William Arthur Ward


“Heaven is full of answers to prayer for which no one bothered to ask.”—Billy Graham


“Joy is the flag you fly when the Prince of Peace is in residence within your heart.”—Wilfred Peterson


“When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.”—Helen Keller


“Always demanding the best of oneself, living with honor, devoting one’s talents and gifts to the benefits of others—these are the measures of success that endure when material things have passed away.”—Gerald Ford


“Tears are often the telescope by which men see far into heaven.”—Henry Ward Beecher


“It is a hard rule of life, and I believe a healthy one, that no great plan is ever carried out without meeting and overcoming endless obstacles that come up to try the skill of man’s hand, the quality of his courage, and the endurance of his faith.”—Donald Douglas


He who asks a question may be a fool for five minutes, but he who never asks a question remains a fool forever.—Tom Connelly


Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.—Henry Ford


Life is divided into three terms—that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future.—William Wordsworth


The most effective way to do it, is to do it.—Amelia Earhart


The task ahead of us is never as great as the power behind us.—Ralph Waldo Emerson


Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.—John Steinbeck


One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine with only interests.—John Stuart Mill


Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly.—Robert Schuller


You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it.—Charles Buxton


Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.—Martin Luther King, Jr.


Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.—George Bernard Shaw


We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.—Benjamin Franklin


Instead of thinking about where you are, think about where you want to be. It takes twenty years of hard work to become an overnight success.—Diana Rankin


You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.”—Alan Watts


“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”—Anaïs Nin


The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.—Charles Lamb


“I know of no single formula for success. But over the years I have observed that some attributes of leadership are universal and are often about finding ways of encouraging people to combine their efforts, their talents, their insights, their enthusiasm and their inspiration to work together.”—Queen Elizabeth II

May 2019

When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it’s only a minute. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.—Albert Einstein


It is neither wealth nor splendor; but tranquility and occupation which give happiness.—Thomas Jefferson


“I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.”—Helen Keller


The most damaging phrase in the language is: “It’s always been done that way.”—Rear Admiral Grace Hopper


Let everyone sweep in front of his own door and the whole world will be clean.—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.—Louisa May Alcott


There are two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live.—John Adams


The best thing to give to your enemy is forgiveness; to an opponent, tolerance; to a friend, your heart; to your child, a good example; to a father, deference; to your mother, conduct that will make her proud of you; to yourself, respect; to all men, charity.—Arthur James Balfour


When others kid me about being bald, I simply tell them that the way I figure it, the good Lord only gave men so many hormones, and if others want to waste theirs on growing hair, that’s up to them.—John Glenn


“Keep your face always toward the sunshine, and shadows will fall behind you.”—Walt Whitman


“Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened.”—Dr. Seuss


“If you’re dumb, surround yourself with smart people. If you’re smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.”—Aaron Sorkin


If it was going to be easy to raise kids, it never would have started with something called labor.—Anonymous


“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”—Dwight Eisenhower


“To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.”—Paul Ehrlich


"What makes us discontented with our condition is the absurdly exaggerated idea we have of the happiness of others."—Anonymous


“Nowadays, people can be divided into three classes—the Haves, the Have-Nots, and the Have-Not-Paid-for-What-They-Haves.”—Earl Wilson


“The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.”—Aristotle


Dear is my friend, but my foe too

Is friendly to my good;

My friend the thing shows I can do,

My foe the thing I should.

      —Johann C. F. von Schiller


“We are not retreating; we are advancing in another direction.”—General Douglas MacArthur


“The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.”—John Ruskin


“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”—Rabindranath Tagore


“Why wait? Life is not a dress rehearsal. Quit practicing what you're going to do, and just do it. In one bold stroke you can transform today.”—Marilyn Grey


“Well done is better than well said.”—Benjamin Franklin


“Take care of your body with steadfast fidelity. The soul must see through these eyes alone, and if they are dim, the whole world is clouded."—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


“A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world—and might even be more difficult to save.”—C. S. Lewis


“Freedom is the right to do what you ought to do.”—Bishop Fulton J. Sheen


“God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars.”—Elbert Hubbard


“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”—C. S. Lewis


“Everybody can be great ... because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”—Martin Luther King, Jr.


“There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”—John F. Kennedy

April 2019

"It is an undoubted truth, that the less one has to do, the less time one finds to do it in."—Lord Chesterfield


“I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time.”—Charles Dickens


“It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.”—Moliere


“The baby rises to its feet, takes a step, is overcome with triumph and joy—and falls flat on its face. It is a pattern for all that is to come! But learn from the bewildered baby. Lurch to your feet again. You'll make the sofa in the end.”—Pam Brown


“The scariest moment is always just before you start.”—Stephen King


“Don't be afraid to give your best to what seemingly are small jobs. Every time you conquer one it makes you that much stronger. If you do the little jobs well, the big ones tend to take care of themselves.”—Dale Carnegie


We can all be angels to one another. We can choose to obey the still small stirring within, the little whisper that says, "Go. Ask. Reach out. Be an answer to someone's plea. You have a part to play. Have faith." We can decide to risk that He is indeed there, watching, caring, cherishing us as we love and accept love. The world will be a better place for it. And wherever they are, the angels will dance.—Joan Wester Anderson


“How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.”—George Washington Carver


“Be open to learning new lessons, even if they contradict the lessons you learned yesterday.”—Ellen DeGeneres


Bear up, bear on, the end shall tell

The dear Lord ordereth all things well.

      —John Greenleaf Whittier


“If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.”—Maya Angelou


“Faith is taking the first step, even when you don't see the whole staircase.”—Martin Luther King Jr.


“To do anything of value, we have to take risks. And with risk comes fear. If we accept it as the price of progress, then we can take appropriate risks that yield great reward.”—John C. Maxwell


“It is easier to produce ten volumes of philosophical writings than to put one principle into practice.”—Leo Tolstoy


“If the Father deigns to touch with divine power the cold pulseless heart of the buried acorn and to make it burst forth from its prison walls, will He leave neglected in the earth the soul of man made in the image of the Creator? If He stoops to give the rosebush, whose withered blossoms float upon the summer breezes, the sweet assurance of another springtime, will He refuse the words of hope to the sons of men when the frosts of winter come? If matter, mute and inanimate, though changed by the forces of nature into the multitude of forms, can never die, will the spirit of man suffer annihilation when it has paid a brief visit like a royal guest to this tenement of clay? No! I am sure that there is another life as that I live today.”—William Jennings Bryan


“A compliment is a gift, not to be thrown away carelessly, unless you want to hurt the giver.”—Eleanor Hamilton


At this stage in life there’s no doubt

I’ve far less future and far more past

But at least I’ve figured out

Make each day count and make it last.

—Russ Towne


“We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”—Martin Luther King Jr.


“Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.”—Charlotte Brontë


“The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?”—Percy Bysshe Shelley


“Don’t make a habit out of choosing what feels good over what’s actually good for you.”—Eric Thomas


“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”—Bertrand Russell


“We know truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart.”—Blaise Pascal|


We cannot make bargains for blisses,

Nor catch them like fishes in nets;

And sometimes the thing our life misses

Helps more than the thing which it gets.

For good lieth not in pursuing,

Nor gaining of great nor of small,

But just in the doing, and doing

As we would be done by is all.

      —Alice Cary


More things are wrought by prayer

Than this world dreams of.

      —Alfred Tennyson


“Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.”—Jim Rohn


There was a man, though some did count him mad,

The more he cast away, the more he had.

      —From The Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan 


Fear less, hope more, eat less, chew more, whine less, breathe more, talk less, say more, hate less, love more; all good things will be yours.—Swedish Proverb


“Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out.”—Art Linkletter


“You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world’s happiness now. How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to someone who is lonely or discouraged.”—Dale Carnegie

March 2019

I held it truth, with him who sings

To one clear harp in diverse tones

That men may rise on stepping stones

Of their dead selves to higher things.

      —Alfred Tennyson


“A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.”—Mignon McLaughlin


“If you go looking for a friend, you’re going to find they’re very scarce. If you go out to be a friend, you’ll find them everywhere.”—Zig Ziglar


“Any time you sincerely want to make a change, the first thing you must do is to raise your standards. When people ask me what really changed my life eight years ago, I tell them that absolutely the most important thing was changing what I demanded of myself. I wrote down all the things I would no longer accept in my life, all the things I would no longer tolerate, and all the things that I aspired to becoming.”—Anthony Robbins


“Procrastination is like a credit card: it’s a lot of fun until you get the bill.”—Christopher Parker


“Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.”—George Washington


“It is a mistake to suppose that any technological innovation has a one-sided effect. Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but both-and. Nothing could be more obvious, especially to those who have given more than two minutes of thought to the matter. Nonetheless, we are currently surrounded by throngs of one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo. They gaze on technology as a lover does on his beloved, seeing it as without blemish and entertaining no apprehension for the future.”—Neil Postman


Dark waters blossom white in breaking,

High souls are made in the unmaking.

      —Charles Fox


“Keep your face always towards sunshine—and shadows will fall behind you.”—Walt Whitman


“If you could only love enough, you could be the most powerful person in the world.”—Emmet Fox


“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.”—Henry David Thoreau


“When was the last time you did something for the first time?”―John C. Maxwell


Sow thou sorrow and thou shalt reap it;

Sow thou joy and thou shalt keep it.

      —Richard Watson Gilder


“Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly, as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to face many a danger, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.”—Annie Besant


“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”—T. S. Eliot


“What ails the truth is that it is mainly uncomfortable, and often dull. The human mind seeks something more amusing, and more caressing.”—H. L. Mencken


“Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly, even if they roll a few more upon it.”—Albert Schweitzer


Still raise for good the supplicating voice,

But leave to Heaven the measure and the choice.

      —Dr. Samuel Johnson


“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.”—Seneca


“Always be a little kinder than necessary.”—James M. Barrie


“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood ... who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and ... if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”—Theodore Roosevelt


“Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.”―John C. Maxwell


“You often feel tired, not because you’ve done too much, but because you’ve done too little of what sparks a light in you.”—Alexander Den Heijer


“When your work speaks for itself, don’t interrupt.”—Henry J. Kaiser


“There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”—Elbert Hubbard


“Perhaps the biggest mistake I made in the past was that I believed love was about finding the right person. In reality, love is about becoming the right person. Don’t look for the person you want to spend your life with. Become the person you want to spend your life with.”—Neil Strauss


“If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.”—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe


“He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory a benediction.”—Bessie Stanley


“A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child.”—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


“Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.”—Brian Tracy


“Take the attitude of a student. Never be too big to ask questions. Never know too much to learn something new.”—Og Mandino

February 2019

“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.”—Henry David Thoreau


Some of your hurts you have cured,

And the sharpest you still have survived,

But what torments of grief you endured

From the evils which never arrived.

      —Ralph Waldo Emerson 


“He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.”—Edmund Burke


“By the work one knows the workmen.”—Jean De La Fontaine


“In the spiritual life, the battlefield is the mind. A mind filled and saturated with the Word of God is a mighty weapon in the hand of the God of that Word.”—Adrian Rogers


“Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.”—Henry Van Dyke


“Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.”—Sydney J. Harris


“Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.”—Margaret Fuller


“I’ve never met a person, I don’t care what his condition, in whom I could not see possibilities. I don’t care how much a man may consider himself a failure, I believe in him, for he can change the thing that is wrong in his life at any time he is ready and prepared to do it. Whenever he develops the desire, he can take away from his life the thing that is defeating it.”—Preston Bradley


“Patience is the companion of wisdom.”—St. Augustine


“Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from.”—Jodie Foster


“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson


“It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.”—Samuel Smiles


“Keep your eyes on the prize.”—Alex Wine


“The whole world is a series of miracles, but we are so used to them we call them ordinary things.”—Hans Christian Andersen


We shall do so much in the years to come,

But what have we done today?

We shall give our gold in a princely sum,

But what did we give today?

We shall lift the heart and shall dry the tear,

We shall plant a hope in the place of fear,

We shall speak the words of love and cheer;

But what did we speak today?

We shall be so kind in the afterwhile,

But what have we done today?

We shall bring to each lonely life a smile,

But what have we brought today?

We shall give the truth a far grander birth,

And to steadfast faith a much deeper worth,

We shall feed the hung’ring souls of earth;

But whom have we fed today?

We shall reap such joys in the by and by,

But what have we sown today?

We shall build us mansions up in the sky,

But what have we built today?

Oh, how sweet it is in fond dreams to bask,

But right here and now we must do our task.

Yes, this is the thing our souls must ask,

“Just what have we done today?”

      —Unknown


“It takes a long time to grow an old friend.”—John Leonard


“The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.”—Bertrand Russell


“For myself I am an optimist—it does not seem to be much use being anything else.”—Winston Churchill


“What we hope ever to do with ease we may learn first to do with diligence.”—Samuel Johnson


Love much. There is no waste in freely giving;

More blessed is it, even, than to receive.

He who loves much, alone finds life worth living;

Love on, through doubt and darkness; and believe

There is nothing which Love may not achieve.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox


“Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.”—James Russell Lowell


“Success ... seems to be connected with action. Successful men keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.”—Conrad Hilton


“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”—Benjamin Franklin


“We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.”—Goethe


What matter will it be, O mortal man, when thou art dying,

Whether upon a throne or on the bare earth thou art lying?

—From the Persian


“We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”—William Shakespeare


“A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.”—Caskie Stinnett

December 2018

“Movements are like this. They are grassroots, often underground, and they start with crazy people who are willing to believe in the impossible. Movements never start in corporate offices with executives drawing up a master plan … if we truly want to see the world changed, we must begin as a band of madmen, welcoming other crazy people who want to be a part of something bigger than themselves.”—Neil Cole 


“I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I’ve bought a big bat. I’m all ready, you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!”—Dr. Seuss


Search thine own heart. What paineth thee

In others in thyself may be;

All dust is frail, all flesh is weak;

Be thou the true man thou dost seek.

      —John Greenleaf Whittier


When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flock,

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations,

To bring peace among people,

To make music in the heart.

      —Howard Thurman 


“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.”—William Pollard


“May the humility of the shepherds, the perseverance of the wise men, the joy of the angels, and the peace of the Christ Child be God’s gifts to you and yours this Christmastime and always.”—Traditional Moravian blessing


“Christmas is most truly Christmas when we celebrate it by giving the light of love to those who need it most.”—Ruth Carter Stapleton


“The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse.”—Helen Keller


“There is no need to plead that the love of God shall fill our heart as though he were unwilling to fill us. He is willing as light is willing to flood a room that is opened to its brightness; willing as water is willing to flow into an emptied channel. Love is pressing round us on all sides like air. Cease to resist, and instantly love takes possession.”—Amy Carmichael


“Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.”—Abraham Lincoln


“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will themselves not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die.”—Daniel Burnham


“History teaches, but it has no pupils.”—Antonio Gramsci


It is easy to die for Christ.

It is hard to live for Him.

Dying takes only an hour or two,

But to live for Christ

Means to die daily.

Only during the few years of this life

Are we given the privilege of serving

Each other and Christ…

We shall have heaven forever,

But only a short time for service here,

And therefore we must not waste the opportunity.

      —Sadhu Sundar Singh


“How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.”—John Burroughs


“It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.”—Edmund Hillary


“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.”—Bertrand Russell


“The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions—the little, soon-forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment.”—Samuel Taylor Coleridge


“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.”—Woodrow Wilson


“For myself I am an optimist—it does not seem to be much use being anything else.”—Sir Winston Churchill


What secret trouble stirs thy heart?

Why all this fret and flurry?

Dost thou not know that what is best

In this too restless world is rest

From overwork and hurry?

      —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


“Have a vision. It is the ability to see the invisible. If you can see the invisible, you can achieve the impossible.”—Shiv Khera


“Happiness does not come from doing easy work but from the afterglow of satisfaction that comes after the achievement of a difficult task that demanded our best.”—Theodore Isaac Rubin


“If you can’t feed one hundred people, then feed just one.”—Mother Teresa


“Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”—Ronald Reagan


“None think the great unhappy but the great.”—Edward Young 


“One of the greatest victories you can gain over someone is to beat him at politeness.”—Josh Billings


“Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.”—Peter Ustinov


“Most people spend time trying to be someone important, instead of doing something important.”—Darren Hardy


“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”—Rabindranath Tagore