ACTION
Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
—Will Rogers
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single minute before starting to improve the world.
—Anne Frank
There are two things to do about the gospel—believe it and behave it.
—Susanna Wesley
ALCOHOL
Duke University is a world-class university, far superior to Princeton. It is one of the few major universities where it is possible to get drunk four nights a week for four years and still maintain a B-average.
—Duke senior, speaking to a startled alumni group
God gave me a body and the ability to play baseball. He gave me everything. I just wasted it. Now I’m a role model. Don’t be like me.
—recovering alcoholic Mickey Mantle just before his death
ANGER
I’m supposed to hate something, but I’m not sure what. I wasn’t even here last year, and I’m mad.
—Marty Carter, new safety for the Chicago Bears, on their rivalry with the Green Bay Packers
Doomed are the hotheads! Unhappy are they who lose their cool and are too proud to say, “I’m sorry.”
—Robert Schuller
CAREGIVING
Pride cannot coexist with ministry. They are contradictory, so one must die.
—Apologist Ravi Zacharias
Words of comfort, skillfully administered, are the oldest therapy known to man.
—Louis Nizer
HARDSHIP
No man should be pitied because every day of his life he faces a hard, stubborn problem … It is the man who has no problems to solve, no hardships to face, who is to be pitied. … He has nothing in his life which will strengthen and form his character, nothing to call out his latent powers and deepen and widen his hold on life.
—Booker T. Washington
Your life is not going to be easy, and it should not be easy. It ought to be hard. It ought to be radical; it ought to be restless; it ought to lead you to places you’d rather not go.
—Henri Nouwen
PARENTING
Life affords no greater responsibility, no greater privilege, than the raising of the next generation.
—C. Everett Koop, M.D., former U.S. surgeon general
I learned more about Christianity from my mother than from all the theologians of England.
—John Wesley
REVIVAL
Many a so-called revival is only a drive for church members, which adds more unsaved sinners, starched and ironed, but not washed, to a fellowship where even the true believers have not been aroused for years.
—Vance Havner
I have had a vastly greater sense of my own wickedness, and the badness of my heart, than ever I had before my conversion.
—Jonathan Edwards, after awakening came to his congregation
STEWARDSHIP
God is more concerned about my generosity than about the impact of my generosity.
—Writer Tim Stafford
The problem with our giving is that we too often give the widow’s mite, without the widow’s spirit.
—Anonymous
1996 Christianity Today/LEADERSHIP Journal
