Life wasn't all neat and tidy. Along with joy and happiness, there were bitter disappointments and heart-rending loose ends.

You can't take credit for what you do when your back is against the wall.

There are days when you make runs, and there will be a dry spell. Like in business, every year you don't make profits.

An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke - although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness.

Men throw broken things away, but God never uses anything until he first breaks it.

Whenever God means to make a man great, he always breaks him in pieces first.

Every failure teaches a man something, if he will learn; and you are too sensible a man not to learn from this failure.

We see men who have accumulated great fortunes, but we often recognize only their triumph, overlooking the temporary defeats which they had to surmount before arriving.

The circumstances that surround a man's life are not important. How that man responds to those circumstances IS IMPORTANT. His response is the ultimate determining factor between success and failure.

Before God can use a man greatly he must wound him deeply.

So your desire is to do nothing? Well, you shall not have a week, a day, an hour, free from oppression. You shall not be able to lift anything without agony. Every passing minute will make your muscles crack. What is feather to others will be a rock to you. The simplest things will become difficult. Life will become monstrous about you. To come, to go, to breathe, will be so many terrible tasks for you. Your lungs will feel like a hundred-pound weight.

A people, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.