Your deepest valleys lead you to your highest mountaintops.

You may trod me in the very dirtBut still, like dust, I'll rise.

You may encounter defeats, but you must not be defeated.

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.

If I am more alive because love burns and chars me, as a fire, given wood or wind, feels new elation, it's that he who lays me low is my salvation, and invigorates the more, the more he scars me.

We expect to suffer, but we know already that we are victorious.

After years of imprisonment, physical and emotional abuse, and separation from his family, Mandela said, "I realized that they could take everything from me except my mind and my heart. They could not take those things. Those things I still had control over. And I decided not to give them away." So Mandela's story is really the story of those two things he never gave away: his brilliant mind, and his great heart.

The struggle is my life.

To have become a deeper man is the privilege of those who have suffered.

The heart was made to be broken.

I have never met the man I could despair of after discerning what lies in me apart from the grace of God.

Prayer is the exercise of drawing on the grace of God.