Where there is no heart, there may be lip-work and tongue-work, but there is nothing that God listens to,—there is no prayer.

Young men, God does not show favoritism or respects the honors bestowed by men. He rewards no man's heritage, or wealth, or rank, or position. He does not see with man's eyes. The poorest saint that ever died in a ghetto is nobler in His sight than the richest sinner that ever died in a palace.

We live in an age of peculiar spiritual danger. Never perhaps since the world began was there such an immense amount of mere outward profession of religion as there is in the present day.

There is no horizontal stratification of society in this country like the rocks in the earth, that hold one class down below forevermore, and let another come to the surface to stay there forever. Our stratification is like the ocean, where every individual drop is free to move, and where from the sternest depths of the mighty deep any drop may come up to glitter on the highest wave that rolls.

Could I be your hero, or your villain? I guess it just depends in whose eyes

God is not disillusioned with us. He never had any illusions to begin with.

Everyone had forgotten her. But that's the way Penny was-- so quiet and unimportant that you could look right at her and never see her. Esther had no idea why Penny always showed up at Grandma's house on Sunday afternoons when they came to visit. She was just one of those nosy neighbors with no life of her own, who watched other people's lives as if watching a movie.

Guard your heart, son," Eli said in a hushed voice. "That's what God looks at—your heart. Most folks look at the outside things, like the color of your skin. But God looks at your heart.

Even after the war, Eugenia, do you still put people into categories the way you were taught to do—rich and poor, socially acceptable and not, black and white?" "I haven't placed them there. Life has." "But people are all the same in God's eyes, don't you think? Or do you believe there will be segregated divisions in heaven like the ones we've created here on earth?

The exhausting manipulation and control it takes to protect an identity based on circumstances will crush our hearts and hide the best of who we are behind a wall of insecurity.

People aren't thinking about us nearly as much as we might think they are.

Labels only stick if I let them.