“It is substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government.”

“Frankness is not a license to say anything you want, wherever and whenever you want. It is not rudeness.”

“Take things as they are. Punch when you have to punch. Kick when you have to kick.”

“But whenever I tried to pin down this idea of self-esteem, the specific qualities we hoped to inculcate, the specific means by which we might feel good about ourselves, the conversation always seemed to follow a path of infinite regress. Did you dislike yourself because of your color or because you couldn’t read and couldn’t get a job? Or perhaps it was because you were unloved as a child—only, were you unloved because you were too dark? Or too light? Or because your mother shot heroin into her veins … and why did she do that anyway? Was the sense of emptiness you felt a consequence of kinky hair or the fact that your apartment had no heat and no decent furniture? Or was it because deep down you imagined a godless universe? Maybe one couldn’t avoid such questions on the road to personal salvation. What I doubted was that all the talk about self-esteem could serve as the centerpiece of an effective black politics. It demanded too much honest self-reckoning from people; without such honesty, it easily degenerated into vague exhortation. Perhaps with more self-esteem fewer blacks would be poor, I thought to myself, but I had no doubt that poverty did nothing for our self-esteem. Better to concentrate on the things we might all agree on. Give that black man some tangible skills and a job. Teach that black child reading and arithmetic in a safe, well-funded school. With the basics taken care of, each of us could search for our own sense of self-worth.”

“You can be the most grateful person in the world, but if you have not arrived at the place God wants you to be, to do the thing God has destined you and only you to do, that longing will never go away.”

“Real food has the power to give you your life back and more fully engage in the purpose for your life.”

“Prayer shouldn’t be a burden but a privilege—God wants our fellowship.”

“Have you ever been guilty of having a condescending attitude about another person’s weakness? How can we dare to think we can access the soul-cleansing blood that delivers us from the cesspool of our secret sins, and then look down on another member of Christ’s Body in disdain?”

“He looked, from behind, like a fleshless stick figure in overlarge black clothing, a caricature poised for stringy movement at the direction of a puppet master.

“If you don’t figure out your main reason of being born, chances are that, you will fall into another plan which is unlikely to make you to print out your bigger picture!”

“I have seen something like it happen in battle. A man was coming at me, I at him, to kill. Then came a sudden great gust of wind that wrapped out cloaks over our swords and almost over our eyes, so that we could do nothing to one another but must fight the wind itself. And that ridiculous contention, so foreign to the business we were on, set us both laughing, face to face - friends for a moment - and then at once enemies again and forever.”

“Only because Jesus is God and we have confessed Him as Savior and Lord, can He bestow and we receive these benefits, this blessed assurance and hope (see Romans 10:9).”

“But it was not only by this feeling, as Varvara thought, that he was guided. Mingling with his pride, with his need always to be first, was another motive, at which Varvara did not guess - a truly religious urge. His disillusionment in Mary (his betrothed), whom he had imagined such a saint, his feeling of outrage was so cruel that he sank into despair; and despair led him - whither? To God, to the faith of his childhood, which had never lost its hold upon him.

“What are you going to do with what you have been given?”

“Men and women who give [Christ] first place find that there is no need for anxiety about this world’s goods.”