Faith is very important. That’s the reason I have it at the top of my pyramid. Then I have patience: Good things take time, and they should. You shouldn’t expect it to be any different. And you have to have faith that things are going to turn out as they should, as long as you do what you’re capable of doing to help things become reality. There’s too much time spent in just hoping things will happen a certain way. You’re imperfect in your efforts, but you’re not imperfect when you make your best effort. -John Wooden

He [CS Lewis] has made me wary of chronological snobbery. That is, he showed me that newness is no virtue, and oldness is no vice. Truth and beauty and goodness are not determined by when they exist. Nothing is inferior for being old, and nothing is valuable for being modern. This has freed me from the tyranny of novelty and opened me for me the wisdom of the ages. To this day, I get most of my soul food from centuries ago. I thank God for Lewis’ compelling demonstration of the obvious.

He demonstrated for me and convinced me that rigorous, precise, penetrating logic is not opposed to deep, soul-stirring feeling and vivid, lively, even playful, imagination. He was a romantic rationalist. -John Piper

When I was young, I admired clever people.  Now that I am old, I admire kind people. -Abraham Joshua Heschel

Self-denial is never a virtue in itself. It has the value precisely in proportion to the superiority of the reality embraced above the one denied.  -Piper

The world has an inconsolable longing. It tries to satisfy the longing with scenic vacations, accomplishments of creativity, stunning cinematic productions, sexual exploits, sports extravaganzas, hallucinogenic drugs, ascetic rigors, managerial excellence, et cetera. But the longing remains. What does this mean?

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

It was when I was happiest that I longed most.... The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from. 

The tragedy of the world is that the echo is mistaken for the Original Shout. When our back is to the breathtaking beauty of God, we cast a shadow on the earth and fall in love with it. But it does not satisfy.

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistake for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols,breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

I have written this book b/c the breathtaking Beauty has visited us: "The wWord became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory [His beauty!], glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth" (John 1:14). How can we not cry, "Look!" -Piper and Lewis

He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. -Jim Elliot

I never drink water because of the disgusting things that fish do in it. -W.C. Fields.

I believe in free speech and free enterprise because I have no faith whatsoever in the moral capacity of sinful civil government to improve upon the institutions created by sinful individuals. But, for God's sake, let us use our freedom as Christians to say no to the desire for riches and yes to the truth: There is great gain in godliness when we are content with the simple necessitates of life. -John Piper, Desiring God

Many see open-mindedness as an altruism. I say that open-mindedness is only altruistic so much as it has an end in sight of finding something worth being close-minded about. Apart from having this end in view, unabated open-mindedness is unloving, lacks intellectual integrity and is functionally impossible.

Instead, search diligently, then cling diligently. Land where the evidence leads. -me

There is a deep difference between the temporary thrill of a new toy and a homecoming hug from a devoted friend. Who do you think has the deepest, most satisfying joy in life, the man who pays $240 for a fortieth-floor suite downtown and spends his evenings in the half-lit, smoke-filled lounge impressing strange women with ten-dollar cocktails, or the man who chooses the Motel 6 by a vacant lot of sunflowers and spends his evening watching the sunset and writing a love letter to his wife? -John Piper, Desiring God

On worshipping the Creator of nature and not Nature...

"By emptying Nature of divinity - or, let us say, of divinities - you may fill her with Deity, for she is now the bearer of messages. There is a sense in which Nature - worship silences her - as if a child or a savage were so impressed with the postman’s uniform that he omitted to take in the letters." -C.S. Lewis

We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. -C.S. Lewis

People talk about being successful or not being successful, but the concept of success is very ambiguous. There is no need to pursue other people’s ideas of success. -Ichiro Suzuki

The greatest leader is a servant. Don’t be a boss. Be a real leader, a servant leader. A servant leader is a winner. Even when he loses everything, even when he loses his life, a servant leader wins it all. -Pat Williams (Sr. VP of the Orlando Magic)

My daddy used to tell me not to chew on something that was eatin you. -Cormac McCarthy 

He spoke of his campaigns in the deserts of Mexico and he told them of horses killed under him and he said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war.  Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold. His own father said that no man who has not gone to war on horseback can ever truly understand the horse and he said that he supposed he wished that this were not so but that it was so. -Cormac McCarthy

"That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised. -Cormac McCarthy

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

Even those who write against fame wish for the fame of having written well, and those who read their works desire the fame of having read them.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!  -Blaise Pascal

Self-protection is a God-seeking enterprise. -Dr. R. Elliott Greene

Everyone has a plan 'til they get punched in the mouth. -Mike Tyson

For every talent that poverty has stimulated, it has blighted a hundred. -John W. Gardner

“Be sincere, be brief, be seated.” -FDR