The family you come from isn't as important as the family you're going to have.

Successful leaders have the courage to take action where others hesitate.

Feast of Mary Magdalen, Apostle to the Apostles When our lives are focused on God, awe and wonder lead us to worship God, filling our inner being with a fullness we would never have thought possible. Awe prepares the way in us for the power of God to transform us and this transformation of our inner attitudes can only take place when awe leads us in turn to wonder, admiration, reverence, surrender, and obedience toward God.

Perseverance is the most overrated of traits, if it is unaccompanied by talent; beating your head against a wall is more likely to produce a concussion in the head than a hole in the wall.

You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.

A closed mouth catches no flies.

If there is anything better than to be loved it is loving.

Come, seeling night, Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, And with thy bloody and invisible hand Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond Which keeps me pale. Light thickens, and the crow Makes wing to th' rooky wood. Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, While night's black agents to their prey do rouse.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

In every pang that rends the heart the Man of Sorrows has a part.

Boundless intemperance In nature is a tyranny. It hath been Th' untimely emptying of the happy throne And fall of many kings.

A frightened captain makes a frightened crew.

It was swept under the carpet.

We know so well what the unique quality was that held this great and beautiful pride and exquisite humility together. It lay in the relationship he held with God. We know the familiar idea of Jesus' oneness with God: only we deal with it too much as a doctrine of the Church, not as an element in Jesus' own experience. If we never find it in reality, in life, we cannot reveal the true Christ-like character at all -- we will always be trying earnestly to be something, but on too superficial and obvious a plane. ... The Notebooks of Florence Allshorn June 28, 1996 Feast of Irenêus, Bishop of Lyons, Teacher, Martyr, c.200 The Church exists, and does not depend for its existence upon our definition of it: it exists wherever God in His sovereign freedom calls it into being by calling his own into the fellowship of His Son. And it exists solely by His mercy. God shuts up and will shut up every way except the way of faith which simply accepts His mercy as mercy. To that end, He is free to break off unbelieving branches, to graft in wild slips, and to call "No people" His people. And if, at the end, those who have preserved through all the centuries the visible "marks" of the Church find themselves at the same board with some strange and uncouth late-comers on the ecclesiastical scene, may we not fancy that they will hear Him say -- would it not be so like him to say -- "It is my will to give unto these last even as unto thee"? Final judgement belongs to God, and we have to beware of judging before the time. I think that if we refuse fellowship in Christ to any body of men and women who accept Jesus as Lord and show the fruits of His Spirit in their corporate life, we do so at our peril. It behooves us, therefore, to receive one another as Christ has received us.

Beware the deadly fumes of that insane elation Which rises from the cup of mad impiety, And go, get drunk with that divine intoxication Which is more sober far than all sobriety.

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labour by taking up another.

One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it better.

Watch out when you're getting all you want. Fattening hogs ain't in luck.

A person with a bad name is already half-hanged.

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.