That depth at which he goes in me determines how far he goes out of me. It's a personal encounter. It's not our commitment to healing. It's not our commitment to evangelism. It's not our commitment to any of these things. It's our commitment to the person, to live faithfully with a person.

I would go to the deeps a hundred times to cheer a downcast spirit. It is good for me to have been afflicted, that I might know how to speak a word in season to one that is weary.

If you love someone who is ruining his or her life because of faulty thinking, and you don't do anything about it because you are afraid of what others might think, it would seem that rather than being loving, you are in fact being heartless.

Living in a community with very wounded people, I came to see that I had lived most of my life as a tightrope artist trying to walk on a high, thin cable from one tower to the other, always waiting for the applause when I had not fallen off and broken my leg.

I see clearly that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity.

I want to attract as many people to wrestling as I can.

The wretched have no compassion, they can do good only from strong principles of duty.

I have suffered most of the things I write about - or my friends have.

I chose to present myself as one who comes from among the people, and I can be touched by their pain because I have my own.

Under normal circumstances, if the centerpiece of a president's campaign is helping the disadvantaged and we are our brother's keeper, the idea that this same guy has an actual brother living in third-world poverty without any help from Obama, this would have been on the cover of 'The New York Times.' But none of them are touching it.

We talk about touching our guys in a personal way, knowing that we all want to play basketball and coach basketball, but our guys are dealing with stuff and we want to make sure we are sensitive to that.

Those who are compassionate when they should be tough will be tough when they should be compassionate.