Things don't always go the way we want. I've come to realize that some things just aren't meant to be.

Learn to recognize God's sovereignty. Learn to rejoice in God's pleasure. This was Abraham's first lesson, namely that God, not himself, was the Source.

I'd had the idea, once, that if I could get the chance before I died I would read all the good books there were. Now I began to see that I wasn't apt to make it. This disappointed me, for I really wanted to read them all.

I don't think I had even begun to have an idea where I was going, but wherever it was, that was where I wanted to go.

Never make it without the compass. In the trees, I'd lose all sense of perspective. Direction. Maybe life is like that.

I do know this—this right here is just prelude. Dress rehearsal. The intro. One of these days each one of us is going to get called up and given the chance to join our voices in a song we've never heard, yet one we've known our whole lives.

As long we insist on writing our own stories, he cannot write his living will onto our hearts.

I was blaspheming my luck in a way that made my breath smell of brimstone.

Do not be troubled because you have not great virtues. God made a million spears of grass where He made one tree. The earth is fringed and carpeted, not with forests, but with grasses. Only have enough of little virtues and common fidelities, and you need not mourn because you are neither a hero or a saint.

A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman thinks of the next generation.

The mysterious character of providence, which does not stop at simply steering things "in general", but precisely pursues the individual, that which is distinguished from everything else, and dwells in the whole confusing particularity of the world.

You are not a prisoner of your past; you are the architect of your future.