"All the good maxims have been written. It only remains to put them into practice." - Blaise Pascal. Leadership - Volume 1, #1.

"Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be." - Thomas a Kempis. Leadership - Volume 1, #1.

"The porcupine, whom we must handle gloved, may be respected, but is never loved." - Arthur Guiterman. Leadership - Volume 1, #1.

Acceptance

"Every day of his adult life, Ben Franklin set aside the time to examine two questions. The morning question was, 'What good shall I do today?' The evening question was, 'What good have I done today?'"

"As a disclaimer to everything I've ever said or everything I ever will say, when it's all said and done we'll only have two things left to say: One is 'Forgive me' and the other is 'Thank you'." - Rich Mullins, CCM 11/97.

"He that would pass the latter part of his life with honor and decency, must, when he is young, consider that he shall one day be old; and remember, when he is old, that he has once been young." - Samuel Johnson in The Rambler.

"It's a myth that accountability can occur outside of community." - Michael Card

"The golden statue of Prometheus says: 'Every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.'"

"Everyone wants to be noticed; no one wants to be watched." - Anonymous

Accountability

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.'" - Will Rogers

Action

"We can't prevent the problem of sexual addiction within the church if we don't change our message from 'how to feel better now' to the unpopular biblical theme that 'the sufferings we now experience are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.' (Rom. 8:18)." - Dr. Harry W. Schaumburd, False Intimacy: Understanding the Struggle of Sexual Addiction

"Many Christians are only 'Christaholics' and not disciples at all. Disciples are cross-bearers; they seek Christ. Christaholics seek happiness. Disciples dare to discipline themselves, and the demands they place on themselves leave them enjoying the happiness of their growth. Christaholics are escapists looking for a shortcut to nirvana. Like drug addicts, they are trying to 'bomb out' of their depressing world. There is no automatic joy. Christ is not a happiness capsule; he is the way to the Father. But the way to the Father is not a carnival ride in which we sit and do nothing while we are whisked through various spiritual sensations." - Calvin Miller in The Taste of Joy

"In a consumer society, there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addictions and the prisoners of envy." - Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

"We have all had the experience of struggling to break a habit, failing repeatedly, and then at some point meeting with success. What was this success, and how did it happen? We can say it was willpower, but what suddenly empowered our will? We can say it was finding the right strategy, but what enabled that discovery? Did we do it on our own, or did grace break through and deliver us, or was it some mysterious cooperation of will and grace that we could never have engineered?" - Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace

"We admitted we were powerless over alcohol - that our lives had become unmanageable; we came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity; and we made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him." - Adapted from the first three steps of The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous

"I'm afraid the churches are just enabling the addictions of our culture. If we are not free from the cultural addictions in the church, how can we be a healing presence for all those who need to be set free?" - N. Gordon Cosby, By Grace Transformed

"Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism." - Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

"Recovery is a process; it is not a quick fix. It involves much more than giving up the addictive agent." - Anne Wilson Schaef and Diane Fassel, The Addictive Organization

"It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from harsh reality, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcoholic addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts." - Rep. Shirley Chisholm at a Congressional hearing on crime.

"My denial of my sin protects, preserves, perpetuates that sin! Ugliness in me, while I live in illusions, can only grow the uglier." - Walter Wangerin Jr., Reliving the Passion

Addiction

"Judge not a man for the heights he has attained but the depths from which he has come." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Adversity

"When dealing with people it is wise to remember the Triple 'A' Principle. Everyone feels better and does better when you give them Attention, Affirmation, and Appreciation. 'Triple A' stands for good service and that's exactly what you get when you treat people with high esteem." - Saddleback's Core Values: We Are A Value-Driven Church,' Rick Warren, Leadership Lifter #49

Affirmation

"The seven ages of man: spills, drills, thrills, bills, ills, pills, will."

"Man's life means: Tender teens. Teachable twenties. Tireless thirties. Fiery forties. Forceful fifties. Serious sixties. Sacred seventies. Aching eighties. Shortening breath. Death. The sod. God!"

"Retirement can be a catastrophe or a commencement, a rocking chair or a launching pad."

Aging

"We didn't want to support any more adultery scenes. There's enough on television." - 84 year-old Iowa farmer, Aaron Howell, explaining why his family rejected Warner Bros.' lucrative offer to rent their property for the filming of The Bridges of Madison County (Premiere, 2/95)

"One in four adults in your church has been involved in an extramarital affair…"

"Studies of married Americans reveal that approximately one in three men and one in six women enter an affair sometime during their wedded lives…"

"Affairs usually don't just happen, as television and popular romances would lead us to believe. And affairs are not the cause of marriage trouble, but a response to it…"

"When the cupboard is full at home, you don't go someplace else to eat…" -- Anonymous

"Adultery is never a sudden, spontaneous, and totally unexpected act. Therefore, the strongest protection against adultery in a marriage is an attitude of total commitment toward each other. The marriage vow commits one to the satisfaction and happiness of the partner. Sexual satisfaction becomes a gift to the other. In an extramarital friendship, there always comes a point of 'maybe' when there is the realization that the friendship could become something more. By closing the door to anything beyond friendship, each partner should try to see friends through the spouse's eyes. When adultery has occurred, forgiveness is the tool to restore the marriage. There will be feelings of anger, hatred, guilt, pain (physical as well as emotional) humiliation (adultery is a statement that the spouse's lovemaking was of little or no value) and confusion. To begin healing, find a trusted and wise friend, and express your feelings where it will not hurt anyone. Accept no excuses, rationalizations, promises, or defensiveness. Only accept genuine repentance." - Walter Wangerin, Jr. U.S. Catholic, March 1988, pages 27-31.

Adultery

"Adversity introduces a man to himself. - Anonymous

"I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death." - Thomas Paine, 1776

"God is always testing us, and his testing does not come when we are warned and ready. Anyone can pass a test then…
God's tests catch us unprepared, off-guard. It is when we are confronted with some simple situation no one will know about that the tests of life really come. When you are relaxing at home and the phone rings and suddenly you are confronted with a call for help, or a demand for a response - and you had planned to relax and enjoy yourself all afternoon - what happens then? That's the test." - Ray C. Stedman in Man of Faith

"One reason God created time was so there would be a place to bury the failures of the past." - James Long

"If I have learned anything, I owe it neither to precepts nor to books, but to a few opportune misfortunes. Perhaps the school of misfortune is the very best." - Louise Honorine De Choiseul (1734-1801)

"Many people quench the Spirit by being down in the mouth rather than rejoicing, by planning rather than praying, by murmuring rather than giving thanks, and by worrying instead of trusting in him who is faithful." - Cameron Townsend, founder of Wycliff Bible Translators

"Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties." - C. H. Spurgeon, quoted in Streams in the Desert

"The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking as when we created them." - Albert Einstein

"If you do not wish to be full of regrets when you are forced to lie still, work while you can. If you desire to make a sickbed as soft as it can be, do not stuff it with mournful reflections that you wasted time when you were in health and strength." - Charles Spurgeon (quoted in Pulse, Feb. 21, 1997, page 5)

"While expounding on the value of suffering, a saintly old preacher extended his long finger toward the congregation and thundered, 'Brother, if God sends you tribulation, He expects you to tribulate!'" - Sam Cathey, Amarillo Bible Conference

"[Rabbi Harold] Kushner's book [When Bad Things Happen to Good People] was a best seller not only because it is so well written, but also because it caters to a narcissistic age. For us, any suffering, confusion or tragedy is intently unfair and undeserved because we stopped trusting a God whose presence makes suffering, confusion and tragedy bearable." - William H. Willimon in the 'Christian Century' (Feb. 22, 1989), Christianity Today, Vol. 34, #9.

"God created man something on the order of a rubber band. A rubber band is made to stretch. When it is not being stretched, it is small and relaxed, but as long as it remains iin that shape, it is not doing what it was made to do. When it stretches, it is enlarged; it becomes tense and dynamic, and it does what it was made to do. God created you to stretch." - Charles Paul Conn in 'Making It Happen', Christianity Today, Vol. 35, #1.

"No trouble seems pleasant at the time. Yet in God's economy, it is this pain which brings forth new faith. How often we hear, 'I thank God for that hard time; it was the best thing that every happened to me.' Even when we may not find the grace to thank God for our tribulation, we can thank Him for the good that comes from our fire." - Virginia Law Shell in 'Good News', (Nov.-Dec. 1990), Christianity Today, Vol. 35, #11.

"We grow and mature spiritually through adversity - not when everything is going smoothly…in a time of adversity of trouble, the Christian has the opportunity to know God in a special and personal way." - C. Everett Koop

"When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us." - Helen Keller in The Faith of Helen Keller

"God loves us in good times and bad… but he is even more real in our lives when we are having tough times." - Joe Gibbs, former head coach of the Washington Redskins

Adversity

"When people do succeed in breaking free from belief in God, they simply create another religious belief to replace it. We always assimilate religion or God to a specific image, to specific rites or groups, to a specific conception, and when we banish these…we think we have achieved freedom of thought. But we then proceed to an apotheosis of reason or science and we have new gods." - Jacques Ellul in What I Believe

"God and I have a covenant. We leave each other alone." - Catch 22, author Joseph Heller, George, February 1998

Agnostic

"Absence or inefficiency of the supreme power, political disorder, absence or non-recognition of authority in any sphere; moral or intellectual disorder. This is a remarkable achievement of modern liberalism-anarchy amidst, and resulting from, a surfeit of government". - Oxford English Dictionary

Anarchy

"Don't fly into a rage unless you are ready for a rough landing." - Anonymous

"Two things you should never be angry about: what you can control, what you can't control." - Anonymous

"Anger is temporary insanity." - C. H. Spurgeon

"I have no more right as a Christian to allow a bad temper to dwell in me than I have to allow the devil himself to dwell there." - C. H. Spurgeon

"Better to swallow your words than to eat them." - Anonymous

"When you sling mud, you are always losing ground." - Michael Catt

"The worst of slaves is he whom passion rules." - Phillips Brooks

"The worst thing we can bring to a religious controversy is anger." - Matthew Henry

"People who fly into a rage always make a bad landing." - Will Rogers

"Anger is just one letter short of danger." - Anonymous

"If you've got a sharp tongue, you will eventually cut your throat." - Michael Catt

"When a man is wrong and won't admit it, he always becomes angry." - Anonymous

"Anger is momentary madness, so control your passion, or it will control you." - Horace

"Everyone you give someone a piece of your mind, you are being more generous than you can afford to be." - Michael Catt

"It is easy to fly into a passion - anybody can do that - but to be angry with the right person to the right extent and at the right time and with the right object and in the right way - that is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it." - Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2.9

"Anger is self-immolation." - Phillips Brooks

"My life is in the hands of any fool who makes me lose my temper." - Dr. John Hunter

"Anger is a stone cast into a wasp's nest." - Proverb (Malabar)

"The greatest remedy for anger is delay." - Seneca

"Keep cool; anger is not an argument. "- Daniel Webster

"A bulldog can whip a skunk, but it's not worth it." - Vance Havner

"Never answer an angry word with an angry word. It's always the second remark that starts the trouble." - Anonymous

"The two best times to keep your mouth shut are when you are swimming and when you are angry." - Anonymous

"Life appears to me to be too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrong." - Charlotte Bronte

"We get angry with others in direct proportion that we are angry with ourselves." - Albert Ellis

"There was never an angry man that thought his anger unjust." - Francis de Sales

"He who angers you, controls you." - Michael Catt

"He that overcomes his anger conquers his greatest enemy." - Latin proverb

"Hot heads and cold hearts never solved anything." - Billy Graham

"Unholy tempers are always unhappy tempers." - John Wesley

"When a man's temper gets the best of him, it reveals the worst of him." - Anonymous

"It is the great duty of all Christians to put off anger. It unfits for duty… A man cannot wrestle with God and wrangle with his neighbor at the same time. Short sins often cost us long and sad sorrows." - Philip Henry

"The angry man, like the two hot disciples that called fire from heaven, ordains himself the judge, and would have God turn his executioner." - Thomas Adams

Anger