Living, really living, wasn't about clinging to control but about giving it away.

Put your dreams on the altar. They will be resurrected into something even grander.

Holding on to anything is like holding on to your breath. You will suffocate. The only way to get anything in the physical universe is by letting go of it. Let go & it will be yours forever.

God wants us to flourish, and paradoxically we flourish best by obeying rather than rebelling, by giving more than receiving, by serving rather than being served. Six times in the Gospels Jesus iterated the deeper truth that we succeed not by acquiring more and more but by "losing" life through service to God and others.

Also, the Israelites must have admired this man who chose to be one of them, when he could have led an utterly charmed life as an Egyptian prince.

Living by faith includes the call to something greater than cowardly self-preservation.

But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.

I am for going on, and venturing my eternal state with Christ, whether I have comfort here or no; if God doth not come in, thought I, I will leap off the ladder even blindfold into eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell; Lord Jesus, if thou wilt catch me, do; if not, I will venture for thy name.

There is no life as empty as the self-centered life. There is no life as centered as the self-empty life.

One of the great ironies of life is that if you give up your life, you gain it. If you help others, you benefit. If you lose yourself, you find yourself.

Only a coward would send his children to their deaths in order to save his own life.

The passage is not about trying to save your skin by ducking martyrdom or something like that. The word Christ uses for "life" is the word psyche—the word for our soul, our inner self, our heart. He says that the things we do to save our psyche, our self, those plans to save and protect our inner life—those are the things that will actually destroy us.