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_accountability

Without accountability there is no motivation for change. • Scott Boss

If I really love a guy and care for him, I cannot allow him to go on the way he is without some form of confrontation. You win some and you lose some. But I feel that’s my obligation. If I see a guy has a glaring weakness, if I’m in any way involved with him then I’ve got to tell him. • Howard Hendricks, professor at Dallas Theological Seminary

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_adventure

The thirst for adventure is the vent which destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the confined powers. • Ralph Waldo Emerson

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. • J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I...I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. • Robert Frost

In one sense we are always traveling, and traveling as if we did not know where we were going.
In another sense we have already arrived.
We cannot arrive at the perfect possession of God in this life, and that is why we are traveling and in darkness. But we already possess Him by grace, and therefore, in that sense, we have arrived and are dwelling in the light.
But oh! How far have I to go to find You in Whom I have already arrived! • Thomas Merton

It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves. • Sir Edmund Hillary

Life is an adventure to be explored and excavated for its endless unexpected surprises and treasures. • Erwin Raphael McManus

It’s not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena … who, at best, knows in the end the triumph of great achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. So that his place will never be with those cold timid souls who know neither victory or defeat. • Theodore Roosevelt

Throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. • Mark Twain

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately ... and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. • Henry David Thoreau

The Road goes ever on and on
     Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
     And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
     Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
     And whither then? I cannot say. • J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Lord of the Rings, 1954

If life is an adventure, then danger is inherent to the journey. • Erwin Raphael McManus

I will travel to You, Lord, through a thousand blind alleys. You want to bring me to You through stone walls. • Thomas Merton

We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our lives but reactors, to go where the world takes us, to drift with whatever current happens to be running the strongest. • Frederick Buechner

Life is not a problem to be solved; it is an adventure to be lived. • John Eldredge

We shall cease from exploration, and the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know it for the first time.
• T.S. Elliot

Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints. • Chief Seattle

"Did not I, through faith, conquer kingdoms, apply justice, obtain promises, stop the mouths of lions, put out raging fires, escape the edge of the sword, win strength out of weakness, become valiant in war, and put foreign armies to flight? Was I not a man of faith and a man of action in one skin? Why are the faithful so afraid of deeds for fear they should fall into 'Justification by works'? And why is Thy Church so uncomfortable with its men of action? And why do men of spirit so often have to work apart from, and even against it? Are there no longer kingdoms to be conquered, injustice to be destroyed, promises to be obtained? The Son of David is a warrior still. Must He tread the winepress alone?" • David Head

The place where God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. • Frederick Buechner

All that is gold does not glitter; not all those that wander are lost. • J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954

Deeper than our instinct to live is our longing to be alive. Aliveness is different from existence. The latter is a struggle to survive; the former, a thirst for life. • Erwin Raphael McManus

Adventure isn't hanging on a rope off the side of a mountain. Adventure is an attitude that we must apply to the day to day obstacles of life—facing new challenges, seizing new opportunities, testing our resources against the unknown and in the process, discovering our own unique potential. • John Amatt, Organizer participant Canada's first successful expedition to summit Mt. Everest

If you cannot understand that there is something in us which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself—upward and forever upward—then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for. • George Leigh Mallory

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure. • Helen Keller

The way of Jesus is a journey, not a destination. On a journey, the scenery changes. A lot. We can prepare for some things but not all. We make mistakes, figure it out as we go along, and try new things. • Rob Bell

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens. • J.R.R. Tolkien

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure. • Mark Twain

"Don't worry about genius and don't worry about not being clever. Trust rather to hard work, perseverance, and determination. The best motto for a long march is 'Don't grumble. Plug on.' You hold your future in your own hands. Never waver in this belief. Don't swagger... Be honest. Be loyal. Be kind. Remember that the hardest thing to acquire is the faculty of being unselfish. As a quality it is one of the finest attributes of manliness." • Sir Frederick Treves

Running through the forest
Dive into the lake
Bare feet on beaches white
Standing in the canyon
Painted hills around
The wind against my skin
Every ocean
Every sea
Every river
Every stream
Every mountain
Every tree
Every blade of grass will sing
• Partial lyrics from the song "Make a Joyful Noise / I Will Not Be Silent" by David Crowder and Terry Butler 1998

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. • E.M. Forester
 

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_attitude

If the only thing we leave our kids is the quality of enthusiasm, we will have given them an estate of incalculable value. • Thomas Edison

You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her. She was made to be wooed and won by youth. • Winston Churchill

The man who really wants to do something finds a way, the other finds an excuse. • E.C. McKenzie

We cannot choose how many years we will live, but we can choose how much life those years will have. We cannot control the beauty of our face, but we can control the expression on it. We cannot control life’s difficult moments, but we can choose to make life less difficult. We cannot control the negative atmosphere of the world, but we can control the atmosphere of our minds. Too often, we try to choose and control things we cannot. Too seldom, we choose to control what we can...our attitude. • Anonymous

Every time you make a choice you are turning the control part of you, the part that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, you are slowly turning this control thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish one. • C.S. Lewis

An optimist is one who would go after Moby Dick in a rowboat and take along the tartar sauce. • Zig Ziglar

Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude. • President Thomas Jefferson

“The winners in life think constantly in terms of ‘I can, I will and I am.’ Losers, on the other hand, concentrate their waking thoughts on what they should have done, or what they don’t do.” • Denis Waitley, author of The Psychology of Winning

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_bible

The Bible says that being a Christian is not only a great way to die, but it’s also the best way to live. • Bill Hybels

The scriptures were not given for our information, but for our transformation. • D.L. Moody

The vigor of our spiritual life will be in exact proportion to the place held by the Bible in our life and thoughts. • George Mueller

May we store up the truths of God’s Word in our hearts as much as possible. • Billy Graham

There was never found, in any age of the world, either religion or law that did so highly exalt the public good as the Bible. • Francis Bacon

There is a living God. He has spoken in the Bible. He means what He says and will do all He has promised. • Hudson Taylor

Your spirit life is fortified and built up and enriched by communion with the Father and by reading His word. • John G. Lake

There is dust enough on some of your Bibles to write “damnation” with your fingers. • Charles Haddon Spurgeon

This book (the Bible) will keep you from sin or sin will keep you from this book. • D.L. Moody

"The secret of my success? It is simple. It is found in the Bible, 'In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths.' • George Washington Carver

The Bible that is falling apart usually belongs to someone who isn’t!

A Bible and a newspaper in every house, a good school in every district---all studied and appreciated as they merit---are the principle support of virtue, morality, and civil liberty. • Benjamin Franklin

In the Bible, there is enough clarity to enlighten the Elect, and enough obscurity to humble them. • Blaise Pascal

God did not write a book and send it by messenger to be read at a distance by unaided minds. He spoke a Book and lives in His spoken words, constantly speaking His words and causing the power of them to persist across the years. • A.W. Tozer

Bibles laid open, millions of surprises. • George Herbert

We are the Bibles the world is reading; We are the creeds the world is needing; We are the sermons the world is heeding. • Billy Graham

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies: probably because they are generally the same people. • G.K. Chesterton

The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian. • A.W. Tozer

I prayed for Faith, and thought that some day Faith would come down and strike me like lightning. But Faith did not seem to come. One day I read in the tenth chapter of Romans, 'Now Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.' I had closed my Bible, and prayed for Faith. I now opened my Bible, and began to study, and Faith has been growing ever since. • D.L. Moody

It is impossible to mentally or socially enslave a Bible-reading people. The principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human freedom. • Horace Greeley
 

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_character

Adversity is a crossroads that makes a person choose one of two paths: character or compromise.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power. • Abraham Lincoln

Your expression is based on your impression.

The first and best victory is to conquer self. • Plato

Cowardice asks the question: Is it safe? Consensus asks the question: Is it popular? Conscience asks the question: Is it right? • Martin Luther King Jr.

There is nothing brilliant or outstanding in my record, except perhaps this one thing: I do the things that I believe ought to be done...and when I make up my mind to do a thing, I act. • Theodore Roosevelt

The measure of a man’s real character is what he would do if he would never be found out. • Thomas Macauley

There is no substitute for character. You can buy brains, but you cannot buy character. • Robert A. Cook

The great test of a man’s character is his tongue. • Oswald Chambers

When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost. • Billy Graham

What you do speaks so loudly in my ears that I can’t hear a word you are saying. • Ralph Waldo Emerson

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_commitment

Commitment is the enemy of resistance, for it is the serious promise to press on, to get up, no matter how many times you are knocked down. • David McNally

Heart is what separates the good from the great. • NBA legend, Michael Jordan

Never! Never! Never! Never! Give up! • Winston Churchill

If you can’t fly, run! If you can’t run, walk! If you can’t walk, crawl! But by all means keep moving. • Martin Luther King Jr.

Champions are not those who never fail, but those who never quit.

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that, if I do this, You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone. • Thoughts in Silence by Thomas Merton

The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important. • Martin Luther King Jr.

Champions don’t become champions in the ring--they are merely recognized there.

The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender. • Vince Lombardi

The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issue from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would come his way. • William H. Murray

It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what’s required. • Winston Churchill

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_communication

If I were to summarize the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood. This principle is the key to effective interpersonal communication. • Stephen Covey

How pleasant, how delightful, to sit alone and in silence, to converse with God, and so to enjoy the only chief good, in whom all good things are found! – Thomas A` Kempis

If what you say to someone cannot be said to everyone, then say it to no one. • J.E. Murdock

Communication refers to the style and extent of interactions both among members and between members and those outside the team. It also refers to the way that members handle conflict, decision-making, and day-to-day interactions. • Richard Wellins, William Byham, and Jeanne Wilson, authors of Empowered Teams

If I had to name a single all-purpose instrument of leadership, it would be communication. • John W. Gardner

If we are to use the word community meaningfully, we must restrict it to a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure. • M. Scott Peck, psychiatrist and author of The Different Drum

Union is strength. But there can be no union without good communication. • Aesop, Greek fable writer

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_courage

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.• Martin Luther King Jr.

It is the image of God reflected in you that so enrages hell; it is this at which the demons hurl their mightiest weapons. • William Gurnall

Champions are not those who never fail, but those who never quit.

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities... because it is the quality which guarantees all others. • Winston Churchill

Winners are just ex-losers who got mad.

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that, if I do this, You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone. • Thoughts in Silence by Thomas Merton

God’s instructions are to go, live life, take risks, move forward, advance. • Erwin Raphael McManus

To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach out for another is to risk involvement.
To expose feelings is to risk exposing our true self.
To place your ideas, your dreams, before the crowd is to risk loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return.
To live is to risk dying.
To hope is to risk despair.
To try at all is to risk failure.
But risk we must, because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
The man, the woman who risks nothing does nothing, has nothing, is nothing. • Mother Teresa

Lord, the task is impossible for me but not for Thee. Lead the way and I will follow. Why should I fear? I am on a Royal Mission. I am in the service of the King of Kings. • Mary Slessor, beginning her remarkable missionary career in Calabar (now part of modern Nigeria)

I am immortal until my work is done. • John Wesley

The door we fear going through the most may be the very one where we will meet God most profoundly. • Erwin Raphael McManus

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. • C.S. Lewis

One man with courage is a majority. • Thomas Jefferson

He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses friends loses more; but he who loses his courage loses all. • Miguel de Cervantes

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear. • Mark Twain

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_creativity

It is wise to learn; it is God like to create. • John Saxe

Creativity in its purest form is a reflex--a flash of inspiration coming forth from the artist who has glimpsed the splendor of the Divine. • Matt Redman (Inside Out Worship: Insights for Passionate and Purposeful Worship, Regal, 2005, 70)

Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired. • Mark Twain

Ideas are the root of creation. • Ernest Dimnet

The joy is in creating, not maintaining. • Vince Lombardi, NFL Hall of Fame Coach

Originality is the art of concealing your source. • Thomas Edison, inventor

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. • Pablo Picasso

Highly creative people are dedicated to ideas. They don’t rely on their talent alone; they rely on their discipline. Their imagination is like a second skin. They know how to manipulate it to its fullest. • Annette Moser-Wellman (The Five Faces of Genius: The Skills to Master Ideas at Work, Annette Moser-Wellman, New York: Viking, 2001, 9)

Imagination is more important than knowledge. • Albert Einstein

Truly groundbreaking ideas are rare, but you don’t necessarily need one to make a career out of creativity. My definition of creativity is the logical combination of two or more existing elements that result in a new concept. The best way to make a living with your imagination is to develop innovative applications, not imagine completely new concepts. • Sam Weston, creator of the popular action figure GI Joe

There is a correlation between the creative and the screwball. So we must suffer the screwball gladly. • Kingman Brewster, Diplomat and longtime president of Yale University

Creativity is especially expressed in the ability to make connections, to make associations, to turn things around and express them in a new way. • Tim Hansen, graphic designer

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail. • Edwin Pond

Creativity is being able to see what everyone else has seen and think what nobody else has thought so that you can do what nobody else has done. • John C. Maxwell (Thinking For A Change, John C. Maxwell, 2003 Warner Business Books, 105)

You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. • Maya Angelou, poet

“If you don’t ask the, ‘Why this?’ often enough, somebody will ask, ‘Why you?’” • Tom Hirschfield, physicist

The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from the old ones. • John Maynard Keynes, economist

You are the only person on earth, who can use your ability. • Zig Ziglar

If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail; If you can’t be the sun, be a star; For it isn’t by size that you win or you fail—Be the best of whatever you are. • Douglas Mallock

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties. • Erich Fromm

The world is but a canvas to our imaginations. • Henry David Thoreau

Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. • George Lois

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_decisions

Personally I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught. • Winston Churchill

Everything starts with yourself -- with you making up your mind about what you're going to do with your life. I tell kids that it's a cruel world, and that the world will bend them either left or right, and it's up to them to decide which way to bend. • Tony Dorsett, Hall of Fame running back for the Dallas Cowboys

Be the change that you want to see in the world. • Mohandas Ghandi, political and spiritual leader in India

Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones. • Stephen R. Covey

The whole world steps aside for the man who knows where he is going. • Author Unknown

Everything we do proceeds from a decision of will, involves our intelligence and perception, leads to emotional reactions or experiences, is approved or disapproved by the conscience, and is registered in the memory in complete perspective. • Gordon Olson

We are given one life, and the decision is our whether to wait for circumstances to make up our mind, or whether to act, and in acting, to live. • Omar Nelson Bradley

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. • E.M. Forester

When one bases his life on principle, 99 percent of his decisions are already made. • Author Unknown

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_destiny

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. • E.M. Forester

Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved. • William Jennings Bryan

All glory comes from daring to begin. • Eugene F. Ware

The thirst for adventure is the vent which destiny offers; a war, a crusade, a gold mine, a new country, speak to the imagination and offer swing and play to the confined powers. • Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be - brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so small that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It’s not just in us, it’s in everyone.
As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. • Marianne Williamson, 1992 (Used by Nelson Mandela in his 1994 Inaugural Speech)
 

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_discipline

If you can’t fly, run! If you can’t run, walk! If you can’t walk, crawl! But by all means keep moving. • Martin Luther King Jr.

If God can get it through you, God will give it to you. • Pastor E.V. Hill

The man on top of the mountain didn’t fall there.

Save me from my own, private, poisonous urge to change everything, to act without reason, to move for movement's sake, to unsettle everything that You have ordained. • Thomas Merton

It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts. • John Wooden, Hall of Fame Basketball Coach

Looking back, my life seems to be one long obstacle course, with me as the chief obstacle. • Jack Paar

It is easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it. • Ben Franklin

I will get ready and then perhaps my chance will come. • Abraham Lincoln

The price of greatness is responsibility. • Winston Churchill

It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what’s required. • Winston Churchill

I’ve never known a man worth his salt who in the long run, deep down in his heart, didn’t appreciate the grind, the discipline. • Vince Lombardi

Personally, I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught. • Winston Churchill

A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others. A loser wants to be considered an expert by others before he has learned enough to know how little he knows. • Syndey Harris (summing up the elements of a teachable mind-set)

He who would accomplish little must sacrifice little; he who would achieve much must sacrifice much. • James Allen

What we do on some great occasion will probably depend on what we already are; and what we are will be the result of previous years of self-discipline. • H.P. Liddon

Discipline is the refining fire by which talent becomes ability. • Roy L. Smith

Parties who want milk should not seat themselves on a stool in the middle of the field and hope that the cow will back up to them. • Albert Hubert

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. • Leo Tolstoy, novelist

The alternative to discipline is disaster. • Vance Havner

True will power and courage are not on the battlefield, but in everyday conquests over our inertia, laziness, and boredom. • D.L. Moody

If one examines the secret behind a championship football team, a magnificent orchestra, or a successful business, the principal ingredient is invariably discipline. • James Dobson

Sacrifice is an ongoing process, not a one-time payment. • John C. Maxwell

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned, and however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly. • Thomas Huxley, biologist & educator

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_dream

I dream, I test my dreams against my beliefs, I dare to take risks, and I execute my vision to make those dreams come true. • Walt Disney

If you can dream it, you can do it. • Walt Disney

Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul; the blueprints of your ultimate achievements. • Napoleon Hill

Life is one great big canvas; throw all the paint on it you can. • Danny Kaye

Some men see things as they are and say, “Why?” I dream of things that never were and say “Why Not?” • George Bernard Shaw

Man who says, “It cannot be done” should not interrupt man who is doing it. • Chinese Proverb

Great it is to dream the dream,
When you stand in youth by the starry stream,
But a greater thing is to fight life through,
And say at the end...the dream is true.

Give everyone license to dream, and tap the creativity those dreams embody. • The Walt Disney Company “Dream Principle”

The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last. • C.S. Lewis

There are two kinds of people in the world--the realists and the dreamers. The realists know where they’re going. The dreamers have already been there. • Robert Orben

Nothing much happens without a dream. For something really great to happen, it takes a really great dream. • Robert Greenleaf

A great dream with a bad team is nothing more than a nightmare. • John C. Maxwell

All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them. • Walt Disney

Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine. • Elvis Presley

Never tell a young person that something cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for somebody ignorant enough of the impossible to do that thing. • John Andrew Holmes

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. • C.S. Lewis

Throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. • Mark Twain

Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither. • C.S. Lewis

The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives. • Albert Sweitzer

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. • Mark Twain

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_evangelism

If the Holy Spirit were taken away from the New Testament church, 90 percent of what they did would have come to a halt, but if the Holy Spirit were taken away from the church of today, 10 percent of what we do would come to a halt. • A.W. Tozer

Winners of souls must first be weepers of souls. • C. H. Spurgeon

We are the Bibles the world is reading; We are the creeds the world is needing; We are the sermons the world is heeding. • Billy Graham

General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, once said that if he could have his wish, part of the final training for preachers and evangelists would be to have them hung over the open fires of hell for twenty-four hours “so those that were sharing this gospel message would recognize the urgency of it,” he explained.

I will put it into four words for you. Christ died for me. • Charles Spurgeon, when asked if he could put in a few words what his Christian faith was all about.

In eternity there is nothing from this life that will have been more important than the people you and I reached for Christ. • Mike Downey

Would that God would make hell so real to us that we cannot rest; heaven so real that we must have men there; Christ so real that our supreme motive and aim shall be to make the Man of Sorrows the Man of Joy by conversion to Him of many. • Hudson Taylor

That man is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. • Jim Elliot

We are all missionaries. Wherever we go, we either bring people nearer to Christ, or we repel them from Christ. • Eric Liddell

God has prepared the whole world for the gospel and the gospel for the whole world. • Don Richardson.

You have one business on earth--to save souls; therefore, spend and be spent in this work. • John Wesley

If not us, who? If not now, when? • Vinson Synan

We have given too much attention to methods and to machinery and to resources, and too little to the Source of Power, the filling with the Holy Ghost. • J. Hudson Taylor

The church that does not evangelize will fossilize. • Oswald J. Smith

The Gospel is not something we come to church to hear; it is something we go from church to tell. • Vance Havner

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_excellence

Success bases our worth on a comparison with others. Excellence gauges our value by measuring us against our own potential. Success grants its rewards to the few but is the dream of the multitudes. Excellence is available to all living beings but is accepted by the...few. • Dale Carnegie

Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction, and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives. • Willa A. Foster

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say; here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well. • Martin Luther King Jr.

Show me a thoroughly satisfied man, and I will show you a failure. • Thomas Edison

The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra. • Zig Ziglar

God’s work done in God’s way will never lack God’s supply. • J. Hudson Taylor

The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important. • Martin Luther King Jr.

The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor. • Vince Lombardi

People show what they are by what they do with what they have. • Author Unknown

Stress comes from doing less than you can. • Jim Rohn

Your governing values are the foundation of personal success and fulfillment. • Hyrum W. Smith

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. • Aristotle

Nobody who ever gave his best regretted it. • George Halas, former owner of the NFL Chicago Bears

People forget how fast you did a job--but they remember how well you did it. • Howard W. Newton

Don’t be afraid to give your best to what seemingly are small jobs. Every time you conquer one it makes you that much stronger. If you do little jobs well, the big ones tend to take care of themselves. • Dale Carnegie

God is in the details. • Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (great 20th Century architect)

The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today. • Elbert Hubbard

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_failure

The way to succeed is to double your failure rate. • Thomas J. Watson

Failures are divided into two classes—those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought. • John Charles Salak, author

Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently. • Henry Ford

The things which hurt, instruct. • Benjamin Franklin

By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail. • Benjamin Franklin

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. • Thomas Edison

Show me a thoroughly satisfied man, and I will show you a failure. • Thomas Edison

Failure is really a matter of conceit. People don’t work hard because, in their conceit, they imagine they’ll succeed without ever making an effort. Most people believe that they’ll wake up some day and find themselves rich. Actually, they’ve got it half right, because eventually they do wake up. • Thomas Edison

There is no doubt in my mind that there are many ways to be a winner, but there is really only one way to be a loser and that is to fail and not look beyond that failure. • Kyle Rote Jr., soccer player

The difference between greatness and mediocrity is often how an individual views a mistake. • Nelson Boswell

Failure is good. It’s fertilizer. Everything I’ve learned about coaching I’ve learned from making mistakes. • Rick Pitino, NBA coach

The fellow who never makes a mistake takes his orders from one who does. • Herbert V. Brocknow

Defeat may serve as well as victory to shake the soul and let the glory out. • Senator Sam Ervin, Jr.

If silly things were not done, intelligent things would never happen. • Tom Peters

Great minds have purposes; others have wishes. Little minds are subdued by misfortunes; but great minds rise above them. • Washington Irving

A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. • Playwright, George Bernard Shaw

He who makes no mistakes makes no progress. • President Theodore Roosevelt

There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction. • President John F. Kennedy

What kind of man would live where there is no daring? I don’t believe in taking foolish chances, but nothing can be accomplished if we don’t take any chances at all. • Pioneer aviator, Charles Lindbergh

Lord, deliver me from the man who never makes a mistake, and also from the man who makes the same mistake twice. • Dr. William Mayo

There is no failure except no longer trying. There is no defeat except from within, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose. • Ken Hubbard

Ninety-nine percent of failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses. • Agricultural scientist, George Washington Carver

Thank goodness all our mistakes were burned up. Now we can start again fresh. (67-year-old Thomas Edison said after his laboratory burned to the ground.)

It is better to fail in a cause that will ultimately succeed, than to succeed in a cause that will ultimately fail. • Peter Marshall

Failure always made me try harder next time. • Michael Jordan, NBA legend

Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. • Joe Paterno

If you make every game a life-and-death proposition...you’ll be dead a lot. • Dean Smith, the great North Carolina basketball coach

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement. • C.S. Lewis

You were made for something more than merely avoiding failure. • John Ortberg

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_faith

The only thing that limits God is our ability to believe Him.

The only way to learn strong faith is to endure strong trials. • George Mueller

I find your lack of faith disturbing. • Darth Vader

Faith sees the invisible, believes the incredible and receives the impossible. • John L. Mason

Real faith believes God right to the end. • Smith Wigglesworth

Not a great faith we need, but faith in a great God. • J. Hudson Taylor

Little faith will bring your soul to heaven, but great faith will bring heaven to your soul.
• Anonymous

Faith is like a muscle, which grows stronger and stronger with use, rather than rubber, which weakens when it is stretched. • J.O. Fraser, missionary to China

The art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. • C.S. Lewis

Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe. • St. Augustine

Faith is voluntary anticipation. • Clement of Alexandria

There comes a time when you just gotta get up, get out from under the shade, pull your team together, and go to the point of no return. To the best of my understanding, faith is trusting God enough to obey what He has said, and hope is having the confidence that God will do everything He has promised. • Erwin Raphael McManus

Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to an all-knowing God. • Corrie ten Boom

When God is our strength, it is strength indeed; when our strength is our own, it is only weakness. • St. Augustine

Ten thousand enemies cannot stop a Christian, cannot even slow him down, if he meets them in an attitude of complete trust in God. • A.W. Tozer

God’s silence is in no way indicative of His activity or involvement in our lives. He may be silent, but He is not still. • Charles Swindoll

Faith is stronger than fear. • John C. Maxwell

God will lead you through, not around, the valley of the shadow of death. • Max Lucado

Fear is a self-imposed prison that will keep you from becoming what God intends for you to be. • Rick Warren

The door we fear going through the most may be the very one where we will meet God most profoundly. • Erwin Raphael McManus

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens. • J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of The Rings

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_focus

To be able to concentrate for a considerable time is essential to difficult achievement. • Bertrand Russell, philosopher

A good idea can become a great idea when it is given focus time. • John C. Maxwell

The immature mind hops from one thing to another; the mature mind seeks to follow through. • Author Harry A. Overstreet

Keep your mind off the things you don’t want by keeping it on the things you do want. • Author W. Clement Stone

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short in all management of human affairs. • Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. • Theodore Roosevelt

The real path to greatness, it turns out, requires simplicity and diligence. It requires clarity, not instant illumination. It demands each of us to focus on what is vital—and to eliminate all of the extraneous distractions. • Jim Collins, author of Good to Great

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_forgiveness

Only the truly forgiven are truly forgiving. • C.S. Lewis

Doing an injury puts you below your enemy; revenging an injury makes you even with him; forgiving an injury sets you above him! • Anonymous

Get rid of the poison of built-up anger and the acid of long-term resentment. • Charles Swindoll

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_giving

The basic question is not how much of our money we should give to God, but how much of God’s money we should keep for ourselves. • J. Oswald Sanders

If a person gets his attitude toward money straight, it will help straighten out almost every other area in his life. • Billy Graham

There is nothing wrong with men possessing riches. The wrong comes when riches possess men. • Billy Graham

The interest comes to infinitely more than the principal. • Thomas Watson

Be faithful with what you receive, be prayerful about what you need; be open about what you are doing. • E. Brandt Gustavson

Earn all you can, save all you can, and then give all you can. Never try to save out of God’s cause; such money will canker the rest. Giving to God is no loss; it is putting your substance into the best bank. Giving is true having, as the old gravestone said of the dead man, “What I spent I had, what I saved I lost, what I gave I have.” • Charles Haddon Spurgeon

If every Christian would tithe, the church would begin to make an impact on the world that would change it. • R.T. Kendall

Getters generally don’t get happiness; givers get it. • Charles H. Burr

The test of generosity is not how much you give, but how much you have left. • Anonymous

In the kingdom of God, the surest way to lose something is to try to protect it, and the best way to keep it is to let it go. • A.W. Tozer

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. • C.S. Lewis

Giving frees us from the familiar territory of our own needs by opening our mind to the unexplained worlds occupied by the needs of others. • Barbara Bush

You make a living by what you get. You make a life by what you give. • Winston Churchill

What I gave I have, what I spent I had; and what I left I lost. • Robert of Doncaste
 

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_goals

You will never leave where you are until you decide where you would rather be.

It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks, to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel toward our distant goal. • Helen Keller

If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else. • Yogi Berra, Hall of Fame catcher

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. • Theodore Roosevelt

One of the most important things about golf is the presence of clear goals. You see the pins, you know the par—it’s neither too easy nor unattainable, you know your average score, and there are competitive goals—competitive with par, with yourself and others. These goals give you something to shoot at. In work, as in golf, goals motivate. • Professor William Mobley of the University of South Carolina

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. • C.S. Lewis

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. • E.M. Forester

Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither. • C.S. Lewis

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_God

God is a Verb. • Buckminster Fuller

"Go forth today, by the help of God's Spirit, vowing and declaring that in life—come poverty, come wealth, in death—come pain or come what may, you are and ever must be the Lord's. For this is written on your heart, 'We love Him because He first loved us.'" • Charles Spurgeon

We look for visions of heaven, but we never dream that, all the time, God is in the commonplace things and people around us. • Oswald Chambers

How pleasant, how delightful, to sit alone and in silence, to converse with God, and so to enjoy the only chief good, in whom all good things are found! • Thomas A` Kempis

Religion exists not because God loves too little, but because we need love so much. In the end all religions misrepresent God. They either dictate requirements for love or simply become a requiem for love. I think many of us have rightly given up on God on this basis alone. We've been told God is a reluctant lover and that his standards must be met before there can be any talk of love. This is lunacy. Love exists because God is love. Our souls will never find satisfaction until our hearts have found this love that we desperately yearn for. God is not passive, for love is never passive, but always passionate; and passion always leads to action. • Erwin Raphael McManus (from Soul Cravings)

God is in the details. • Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (great 20th Century architect)

The next time you hear a baby laugh, or see an ocean wave, take note. Pause and listen as His Majesty whispers ever so gently, “I’m here.” • Max Lucado

We need never shout across the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than our most secret thoughts. • A.W. Tozer

Mark it down. God never turns away the honest seeker. Go to God with your questions. You may not find all the answers, but in finding God, you know the One who does. • Max Lucado

The God who spoke still speaks. He comes into your world. He comes to do what you can’t. • Max Lucado

After ten thousand insults, He still loves you as infinitely as ever. • Charles Spurgeon

God’s desire is not to corral you, but to set you free. God’s compass for life is not information, but truth. The key is not the ability to read God’s mind, but to know His heart. • Erwin Raphael McManus

All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen. • Ralph Waldo Emerson

God enters by a private door into every individual. • Ralph Waldo Emerson

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation [and] is but a reflection of human frailty. • Albert Einstein

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing. • C.S. Lewis

God loves each of us as if there were only one of us. • Saint Augustine

We were made for God and we will be restless until we find rest in him. • Saint Augustine

Though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him. • C.S. Lewis

So let it be in God's own might We gird us for the coming fight, And, strong in Him whose cause is ours In conflict with unholy powers, We grasp the weapons he has given, -- The Light, and Truth, and Love of Heaven. • John Greenleaf Whittier

I gave in, and admitted that God was God. • C.S. Lewis

I think for the average person the progression will be something like this: First a sound as of a Presence walking in a garden. Then a Voice, more intelligible, but still far from clear. Then the happy moment when the Spirit begins to illuminate the Scriptures, and that which had been only a sound, or at best a voice, now becomes an intelligible word, warm and intimate and clear as the word of a dear friend. Then will come life and light, and best of all, the ability to see and rest in and embrace Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord and All. • A.W. Tozer in The Pursuit of God

The greatest love of all is God’s love for us, a love that showed itself in action. • Billy Graham

A comprehended god is no god. • St. John Chrysostom

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_grace

This is the mystery of the riches of divine grace for sinners, for by a wonderful exchange our sins are now not ours but Christ's, and Christ's righteousness is not Christ's, but ours. • Martin Luther

Grace is the free, undeserved goodness and favor of God to mankind. • Matthew Henry

The law works fear and wrath; grace works hope and mercy. • Martin Luther

Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. • Abraham Lincoln

I take the love of God and self-denial to be the sum of all saving grace and religion. • Richard Baxter

Soar back through all your own experiences. Think of how the Lord has led you in the wilderness and has fed and clothed you every day. How God has borne with your ill manners, and put up with all your murmurings and all your longings after the 'sensual pleasures of Egypt!' Think of how the Lord's grace has been sufficient for you in all your troubles. • Charles Spurgeon
 

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_growth

I knew a man who grabbed a cat by the tail and learned forty percent more about cats than the man who didn’t. • Mark Twain

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something. • Ralph Waldo Emerson

Save me from my own, private, poisonous urge to change everything, to act without reason, to move for movement's sake, to unsettle everything that You have ordained. • Thomas Merton

We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are. • Max DePree

Empty the coins of your purse into your mind and your mind will fill your purse with coins. • Benjamin Franklin

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_healing

Because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all our problems and their solutions are theological. • A.W. Tozer

God can heal any disease, but He is not obligated to do so. • Warren Wiersbe

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_imagination

My alphabet starts with this letter called yuzz. It's the letter I use to spell yuzz-a-ma-tuzz. You'll be sort of surprised what there is to be found once you go beyond 'Z' and start poking around! • Dr. Seuss

The world is but a canvas to the imagination. • Henry David Thoreau

Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed. • G. K. Chesterton

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea. • Francis Bacon

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. • Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras, 1942

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create. • Albert Einstein

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world. • Blaise Pascal

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere. • Carl Sagan

Don't expect anything original from an echo. • Author Unknown

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities. • Theodore Geisel

A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. • Author Unknown

A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming. • Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some men see things as they are and say, “Why?” I dream of things that never were and say “Why Not?” • George Bernard Shaw

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. • Michelangelo

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. • Henry David Thoreau

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them. • Pablo Picasso

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. • Ansel Adams

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try! • Dr. Seuss, from the book Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club. • Jack London

The Possible's slow fuse is lit
By the Imagination. • Emily Dickinson

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. • Mark Twain

I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see. • Duane Michals, Real Dreams

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds. • G. K. Chesterton

It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block. • Paul Gauguin

I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained. • Walt Disney

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. • Albert Einstein

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_influence

Go out today and preach the gospel and if you must, use words. • St. Francis of Assisi

Title, position, and authority may hold power, but influence travels through relationships. And in the end, influence is the fountainhead of power. • Erwin Raphael McManus

This is the essence of influence, to win the heart and soul of another person through the strength of your own character and personhood. • Erwin Raphael McManus

Character is the resource from which influence draws. Relationships are the venue through which influence travels. • Erwin Raphael McManus

The ultimate end and most profound result of influence is when a person is free from any command or power you may exert and yet still reflects the influence of your values and passions. • Erwin Raphael McManus

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. • Theodore Roosevelt

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_innovation

Creativity involves taking what you have, where you are, and getting the most out of it. • Carl Mays, business and sports team consultant

I believe in being an innovator. • Walt Disney

You are the only person on earth, who can use your ability. • Zig Ziglar

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. • Peter F. Drucker

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse. • Winston Churchill

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_integrity

A person of integrity is one who has established a system of values against which all of life is judged. • V. Gilbert Beers

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. • Ralph Waldo Emerson

The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office. • Dwight D. Eisenhower

Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity. • W. Clement Stone

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_leadership

A leader can give up anything--except final responsibility. • John C. Maxwell

As long as you’re green, you’re growing. As soon as you’re ripe, you start to rot. • Ray Kroc

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.

No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself or to get all the credit for doing it. • Andrew Carnegie

Outstanding leaders go out of the way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish. • Sam Walton

You’re got to have mentors along the way. • Lee Iacocca

The problem with most leaders today is they don’t stand for anything. Leadership implies movement toward something, and convictions provide that direction. If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything. • Don Shula, Winningest coach in NFL history

Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality. • Warren G. Bennis, leadership expert

In every age there comes a time when a leader must come forward to meet the needs of the hour. Therefore, there is no potential leader who does not have the opportunity to make a positive difference in society. Tragically, there are times when a leader does not rise to the hour. • Winston Churchill

A leader is best
When people barely know that he exists,
Not so good when people obey and acclaim him
Worse when they despise him.
"Fail to honor people,
They fail to honor you."
But of a good leader, who talks little,
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled
They will all say, "We did this ourselves." • Lao-Tzu, Chinese Philosopher

The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. • Max De Pree

Leadership is a combination of strategy and character. If you must be without one, be without strategy. • General Norman Schwarzkopf, the Army general in charge of the Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s

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_love

The greatest love of all is God’s love for us, a love that showed itself in action. • Billy Graham

Anger is the fluid that love bleeds when you cut it. • C.S. Lewis

Love is a better teacher than duty. • Albert Einstein

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. • Oscar Wilde

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it. • Martin Luther King, Jr.

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend. • Martin Luther King, Jr.

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_mentoring

Everyone who makes it has a mentor. • The Harvard Business Review

You’ve got to have mentors along the way. • Lee Iacocca

Contemporary mentoring is a caring relationship based on mutual respect that extends beyond normal business skills and goals into values, beliefs, and friendships. • Stephen Graves

I know of no leader in any era who hasn’t had at least one mentor: a teacher who found things in him he didn’t know were there, a parent, a senior associate who showed him the way to be, or in some cases, not to be, or demanded more from him than he knew he had to give. • Warren Bennis, acclaimed author and business professor

If I really love a guy and care for him, I cannot allow him to go on the way he is without some form of confrontation. You win some and you lose some. But I feel that’s my obligation. If I see a guy has a glaring weakness, if I’m in any way involved with him then I’ve got to tell him. • Howard Hendricks, professor at Dallas Theological Seminary

Anyone can see people as they are. It takes a leader to see what they can become, encourage them to grow in that direction, and believe that they will do it. People always grow toward a leader’s expectations, not his criticism and examinations. • John C. Maxwell (Developing The Leaders Around You, John C. Maxwell, 1995 Thomas Nelson Publishers, 69)

In order to be a good mentor I have to see a person not in terms of what they are, but in terms of what they can become. Therefore, I’m going to make an investment. • Howard Hendricks, professor at Dallas Theological Seminary

Your protégé is more apt to do what you inspect that what you expect. • Floyd Wickman, author of Mentoring—A Success Guide for Mentors and Protégés

If you are looking for the perfect person to be your Discipler, Teacher, Master, Tutor, Guardian, Guide, Father/Mother-figure, Trainer, Leader, Instructor, Counselor, Mentor and/or Coach, then I’ve got some bad news for you. That person doesn’t exist…My advice: Get over it. • Stephen Caldwell

There is something that is much more scarce, something finer by far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability. • Elbert Hubbard

No one can become rich without himself enriching others. • Andrew Carnegie

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_obedience

If God can get it through you, God will give it to you. • Pastor E.V. Hill

The best measure of the spiritual life is not its ecstasies, but its obedience. • Oswald Chambers

You have not really learned a commandment until you have obeyed it…The church suffers today from Christians who know volumes more then they practice. • Vance Havner (Havner, Consider Jesus, 61)

Faith, as Paul saw it, was a living, flaming thing leading to surrender and obedience to the commandments of Christ. • A.W. Tozer

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_opportunity

You were born an original, don’t die a copy. • John L. Mason

I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty. • John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

Everyone has a great idea in the shower, but only a few people step out, dry off, and do something about it.

When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us. • Alexander Graham Bell

There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction. • President John F. Kennedy

Do not follow where the path may lead. Follow God, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail. • Author Unknown

The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last. • C.S. Lewis

There comes a special moment in everyone’s life, a moment for which that person was born. That special opportunity, when he seizes it, will fulfill his mission. A mission for which he is uniquely qualified. In that moment, he finds greatness. It is his finest hour. • Winston Churchill

Life is one great big canvas; throw all the paint on it you can. • Danny Kaye

One action is more valuable than a thousand good intentions. • John L. Mason

Dream. Believe. Dare. Do. (The four pillars upon which the phenomenally successful Walt Disney Company is based)

If you wait for perfect conditions, you will never get anything done. • Ecclesiastes 11:4, Living Bible paraphrase

If it’s to be, it’s up to me. • Truett Cathy, founder of Chick-Fil-A

Never tell a young person that something cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for somebody ignorant enough of the impossible to do that thing. • John Andrew Holmes

God’s instructions are to go, live life, take risks, move forward, advance. • Erwin Raphael McManus

That man is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. • Jim Elliot

Occasions are rare; and those who know how to seize upon them are rarer. • Josh Billings

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_optimism

The first and most important step toward success is the expectation that we can succeed. • Nelson Boswell

The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last. • C.S. Lewis

An optimist is one who would go after Moby Dick in a rowboat and take along the tartar sauce. • Zig Ziglar

The only thing that stands between a man and what he wants from life is often merely the will to try it and the faith to believe that it is possible. • Richard M. DeVos, billionaire entrepreneur

Nothing is so embarrassing as watching someone do something that you said could not be done. • Sam Ewing

Never tell a young person that something cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for somebody ignorant enough of the impossible to do that thing. • John Andrew Holmes

God’s instructions are to go, live life, take risks, move forward, advance. • Erwin Raphael McManus

The mundane is not really the best context for a miracle. When we play it safe, we squeeze God out of the formula. • Erwin Raphael McManus

Occasions are rare; and those who know how to seize upon them are rarer. • Josh Billings

An optimist sees an opportunity in every calamity; a pessimist a calamity in every opportunity. • Winston Churchill

When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us. • Alexander Graham Bell

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_passion

There are many things that catch my eye, but few that catch my heart; it is those I consider to pursue. • Tim Redmond

Give me the love that leads the way, The faith that nothing can dismay, The hope no disappointments tire, The passion that will burn like fire, Let me not sink to be a clod: Make me Thy fuel, Flame of God. • Amy Carmichael

Heal my heart and make it clean
Open up my eyes to the things unseen
Show me how to love
Like you have loved me
Break my heart for what breaks yours
Everything I am
For Your kingdom's cause
As I walk from earth into eternity. • Brooke Fraser, partial lyrics from the song Hosanna, Hillsong

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them. • George Eliot

My God, lock me in Your Will, imprison me in Your Love and Your Wisdom, draw me to Yourself. I will never do anything when the strongest reason for doing it is only my own satisfaction. • Thomas Merton

Go all the way; don’t let anything keep you from appropriating the promises of God in your own life. • A.A. Allen

If your heart takes more pleasure in reading novels, or watching TV, or going to the movies, or talking to friends, rather than just sitting alone with God and embracing Him, sharing His cares and His burdens, weeping and rejoicing with Him, then how are you going to handle forever and ever in His presence...? You'd be bored to tears in heaven, if you're not ecstatic about God now! • Keith Green

The starting point of all achievement is desire. • Napoleon Hill

Longing is the heart's treasury. • Saint Augustine

There comes a moment that defines winning from losing. The true warrior understands and seizes the moment by giving an effort so intensive and so intuitive that it could be called one from the heart. • Pat Riley, Championship-winning NBA coach

A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. • Winston Churchill

When you believe a thing, believe it implicitly and unquestionably. • Walt Disney

Complete weakness and dependence will always be the occasion for the Spirit of God to manifest His power. • Oswald Chambers

Never tell a young person that something cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for somebody ignorant enough of the impossible to do that thing. • John Andrew Holmes

Vision does not ignite growth, passion does. Passion fuels vision, and vision is the focus of the power of passion. Leaders who are passionate about their call create vision. • Ken Hemphill

I want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it has brought us to our present low estate. The stiff and wooden quality about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire. Complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present or there will be no manifestation of Christ to His people. He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with many of us He waits so long, so very long, in vain. • C.S. Lewis

He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. • C.S. Lewis

Save me from my own, private, poisonous urge to change everything, to act without reason, to move for movement's sake, to unsettle everything that You have ordained. • Thomas Merton

Catch on fire with enthusiasm and people will come for miles to watch you burn. • Charles Wesley

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_planning

The more you sweat in preparation the less you bleed in battle.

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. • E.M. Forester

A vision without a strategy is a fantasy.

The starting point of all achievement is desire. • Napoleon Hill

Begin with the end in mind. • Walter Payton

By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail. • Benjamin Franklin

Life is one great big canvas; throw all the paint on it you can. • Danny Kaye

Great things are achieved by those who dare to believe that God inside them is superior to circumstances.

Even the right decision is the wrong decision if it is made too late. • Lee Iacocca, Former Chrysler Chairman

There is nothing brilliant or outstanding in my record, except perhaps this one thing: I do the things that I believe ought to be done...and when I make up my mind to do a thing, I act. • President Theodore Roosevelt

Those who do not create the future they want must endure the future they get. • Author Unknown

If you are planning for one year, grow rice. If you are planning for twenty years, grow trees. If you are planning for centuries, grow men. • Chinese Proverb

There is nothing so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task. • William James

The goal shapes the plan. The plan shapes the action. The action achieves the results. The results bring success. • (“Failing Forward”, John C. Maxwell, 181-182)

Dream. Believe. Dare. Do. • (The four pillars upon which the phenomenally successful Walt Disney Company is based.)

If you change something in the planning stage, it costs you a dollar. If you change something in the design phase, it costs you ten dollars. If you change something after the plant is built, it costs you a hundred dollars. • Brian Hartke, manager of project engineering at the Bristol-Myers Squibb Company’s Mead Johnson Nutritional Division.

On this and every turn, we’ll be making progress and progress is not just moving ahead. Progress is dreaming, working, building a better way of life. • Walt Disney

Not why it can’t be done—but how it can be done. • John C. Maxwell

Spectacular achievements come from unspectacular preparation. • Roger Staubach

It’s better to prepare than to repair. • John C. Maxwell

The man who is prepared has his battle half-fought. • Miguel De Cervantes, Spanish novelist
Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success. • Henry Ford

It’s not what you are going to do, but it’s what you are doing now that counts. • Napoleon Hill

The man who is prepared has his battle half fought. • Miguel de Cervantes, Spanish novelist

The one with the plan is the one with the power. • John C. Maxwell (Thinking For A Change, John C. Maxwell, 2003 Warner Business Books, 146)

The will to win is worthless if you do not have the will to prepare. • Thane Yost

Make your plans as fantastic as you like, because twenty-five years from now, they will seem mediocre. Make your plans ten times as great as you first planned, and twenty-five years from now you will wonder why you did not make them fifty times as great. • Henry Curtis

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poverty

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. • Bono, lead singer of U2

Nothing that you have not given away will ever truly be yours. • C.S. Lewis

The opposite of poverty is not wealth, the opposite of poverty is enough. • Wess Stafford, President, Compassion International

For the Lord Jesus Christ's sake, Do all the good you can, To all the people you can, In all the ways you can, As long as ever you can. • Epitaph, tombstone inscription in Shrewsbury, England

There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread. • Mohandas Ghandi, political and spiritual leader in India

It's the greatest poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish. • Mother Teresa

The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing. • Albert Einstein

The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But ... the good Samaritan reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?'" • Martin Luther King Jr.

To me, a faith in Jesus Christ that is not aligned with the poor ... it's nothing. • Bono, lead singer of U2

When a poor person dies of hunger, it has not happened because God did not take care of him or her. It has happened because neither you nor I wanted to give that person what he or she needed. • Mother Teresa

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. • Martin Luther King Jr.

You can't comfort the afflicted without afflicting the comfortable. • Princess Diana, Princess of Wales

The Bible insists that the best test of a nation's righteousness is how it treats the poorest and most vulnerable in its midst. • Jim Wallis, Founder, Sojourners Magazine

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_prayer

What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe. • Day of a Stranger by Thomas Merton

Real Prayer--determined, prevailing prayer--is the greatest outlet of power on earth. • A.A. Allen

Prayer and prayer alone, much prayer, persistent prayer is the door of entrance into the heart of God. • John G. Lake

Prayer is the key to the morning and the bolt of the evening. • Anonymous

Prayer delights God’s ear, it melts His heart, it opens His hand; God cannot deny a praying soul. • Thomas Watson

Prayer baths the soul in an atmosphere of the divine presence. • Charles Finney.

Daniel would rather spend a night with the lions than miss a day in prayer. • Anonymous

My God, I pray better to You by breathing. I pray better to You by walking than by talking. • Thomas Merton

The one concern of the devil is to keep Christians from praying. He fears nothing from prayerless studies, prayerless work, prayerless religion. He laughs at our toil, mocks at our wisdom, but trembles when we pray. • Samuel Chadwick

Prayer is a mighty instrument, not for getting man’s will done in Heaven, but for getting God’s will done on earth. • Robert Law

Prayer is not about informing God of your needs, nor is it even about trying to convince God to help you. Prayer is about connecting to God. It is about experiencing His presence and moving with Him in intimate communion. • Erwin Raphael McManus

There are some forms of spiritual life which are not absolutely essential, but prayer is the very essence of spirituality. • C.H. Spurgeon

Prayer is never the least we can do; it is always the most! • A.W. Tozer

Prayer moves the arms that moves the world. • Annie Armstrong

I have a very simple way of prayer. It is centered entirely on attention to the presence of God and to His will and His love. That is to say it is centered on faith by which alone we can know the presence of God. One might say this gives my meditation the character described by the Prophet as "being before God as if you saw Him." Yet it does not mean imagining anything or conceiving a precise image of God, for to my mind this would be a kind of idolatry. On the contrary, it is a matter of adoring Him as invisible and infinitely beyond our comprehension, and realizing Him as all. My prayer tends very much toward what you call fana. There is in my heart this great thirst to recognize totally the nothingness of all that is not God. My prayer is then a kind of praise rising up out of the center of Nothing and Silence. • Thomas Merton

Pray as if it’s all up to God, work as if it’s all up to you. • Anonymous

A man may study because his brain is hungry for knowledge, even Bible knowledge. But he prays because his soul is hungry for God. • Leonard Ravenhill

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_priorities

We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are. • Max DePree, leadership expert

A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chapter, have our short devotions, and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar. The tragic results of this spirit are all about us. Shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun in gospel meetings, the glorification of men, trust in religious externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit; these and such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul. • A.W. Tozer

Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right things. • Peter Drucker

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned, and however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly. • Thomas Huxley, biologist and educator

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_purpose

It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else and still unknown to himself. • Francis Bacon.

You were born an original, don’t die a copy. • John L. Mason

There are many things that catch my eye, but few that catch my heart; it is those I consider to pursue. • Tim Redmond

For the Lord Jesus Christ's sake, Do all the good you can, To all the people you can, In all the ways you can, As long as ever you can. • Epitaph, tombstone inscription in Shrewsbury, England

If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live. • Martin Luther King Jr.

Remember: it’s not what you have; it’s what you do with what you have that makes all the difference.

The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor. • Vince Lombardi

There are two kinds of people in the world--the realists and the dreamers. The realists know where they’re going. The dreamers have already been there. • Robert Orben

There comes a special moment in everyone’s life, a moment for which that person was born. That special opportunity, when he seizes it, will fulfill his mission. A mission for which he is uniquely qualified. In that moment, he finds greatness. It is his finest hour. • Winston Churchill

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. • C.S. Lewis

The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what it is one’s destiny to do, and then to do it. • Henry Ford

Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life. Everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment. • Viktor Frankl

We were made for God and we will be restless until we find rest in him. • St. Augustine

If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail; If you can’t be the sun, be a star; For it isn’t by size that you win or you fail—Be the best of whatever you are. • Douglas Mallock

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. • Theodore Roosevelt

You were made for something more than merely avoiding failure. • John Ortberg

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_relationship

A friend is one who makes me do my best. • Oswald Chambers

My heroes are and were my parents. I can't see having anyone else as my heroes. • Michael Jordan

The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, nor the kindly smile nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when he discovers that someone else believes in him and is willing to trust him. • Ralph Waldo Emerson

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, "What! You too? I thought I was the only one!" • C.S. Lewis

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_self-worth

You are the only person on earth, who can use your ability. • Zig Ziglar

You are the living product of divine intentionality • Erwin Raphael McManus

What we are is God’s gift to us. What we become is our gift to God. • Anonymous

Find satisfaction in Him who made you, and only then find satisfaction in yourself as part of His creation. • St. Augustine

In the great orchestra we call life, you have an instrument and a song, and you owe it to God to play them both sublimely. • Max Lucado

We are what we believe we are. • C.S. Lewis

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be - brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so small that other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It’s not just in us, it’s in everyone.
As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. • Marianne Williamson, 1992 (Used by Nelson Mandela in his 1994 Inaugural Speech)

We were made for God and we will be restless until we find rest in him. • St. Augustine

If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail; If you can’t be the sun, be a star; For it isn’t by size