Beginning well is a momentary thing; finishing well is a lifelong thing

You can only learn so much from books. You can only learn so much from education. Ultimately, it is the wisdom of God that will carry you through in the toughest situations of life.

We have a right to believe whatever we want, but not everything we believe is right.

We talk so much about one's rights... so little about what is actually right.

A man rejects God neither because of intellectual demands nor because of the scarcity of evidence. A man rejects God because of a moral resistance that refuses to admit his need for God.

There is no greater discovery than seeing God as the author of your destiny.

When you come to religion, you come to a place. When you come to Jesus Christ, you come to a person.

In today's society, looking good and feeling good often trumps doing good and being good. And some people don't know the difference anymore.

Love is hard work. It is the hardest work I know of, work from which you are never entitled to take a vacation.

Truth cannot be sacrificed at the altar of pretended tolerance. Real tolerance is deference to all ideas, not indifference to the truth.

There are so many needs in the world, and our hearts cannot carry them all. You must walk to the priorities God has set before you.

I expect that all of us get pretty much what we deserve of appreciation.

All such action would cease if those powerful elemental forces were to cease stirring within us.

Nationality isn't soul.

I had to take a bit of a break and fast for a while, but then I found myself very, very hungry when I got back to [song-writing].

Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.

I feel that my life and therefore my writing accept the possibility of all the mystery. Everything we don't know; everything that can possibly happen.

I've wanted somehow to convey to you the sensations - the atmospheric pressure, you might say - of what it is to be seriously a long-term prisoner in an American prison.

If life was fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.

Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature.

Writers are the moral purifiers of the culture. We may not be pure ourselves but we must tell the truth, which is a purifying act.