“Positive words come from positive thoughts. It implies, when you open your mouth to talk for people to listen, you have opened your mind for them to read. Think positively; talk positively!”

“Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”

“A clear passion, a resolute determination, a can-do spirit; these are the rods for creating a great mark!”

“There is nothing that wastes the body like worry, and one who has any faith in God should be ashamed to worry about anything whatsoever. ”

“When negative thoughts come, the key is to never verbalize them.”

“Strength in the wrong place is weakness. That’s true of anyone’s gift. If you’re not using your greatest asset in the right way, it’s a weakness. Your greatest strength might be your undoing”

“You are the master of your destiny. You can influence, direct and control your own environment. You can make your life what you want it to be.”

“No American is ever made better off by pulling a fellow American down, and all of us are made better off whenever any one of us is made better off.”

“And that is enough to raise your thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex forever will also drown her pride… Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.”

“If you are going to devote your time to do something you claim you love, take this thought; "am I ready now? When can I begin and have it done without giving up?" This is preparation.”

“If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it . . . ”

“I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.”

“If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”

“To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.” —Letter to John Norvell, 14 June 1807 [Works 10:417--18]” 

“faith begins where the will, or the Word, of God is known.”