
If you can’t be a sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.
Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, “What are you doing for others?”

If you can’t be a sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.
Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, “What are you doing for others?”

The only true remedy for discouragement is to put our hope in God. He alone can give us the courage to persevere.
From Romans 8:28: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to His purpose.”

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering.
Success is like reaching an important birthday and finding you’re exactly the same.

Faith is the courage to face reality with hope.
From Lamentations 3:22-24: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in Him.'”

The great law of culture: Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
From Proverbs 24:27: “Prepare your work outside, get everything ready for you in the field; and after that build your house.”

You live up–or down–to your expectations.
From Psalm 90:17: “Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and prosper for us the work of our hands—O prosper the work of our hands!”

We can never fathom the agony . . . Gethsemane and Calvary stand for something unique; they are the gateway into Life for us.
From Matthew 26:36-38: “Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane; and He said to His disciples, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray.’ He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be grieved and agitated. Then He said to them, ‘I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me.'”

Harmonious partnerships are the result of hard work; they never “just happen.” The “hard work” also includes giving just as much as taking. In one word it means being “unselfish.”
From 1 Corinthians 13:4-6: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.”

A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.
From 1 Corinthians 9:19: “For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them.”

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock.
American-born James A. Baldwin (1924-1987) wrote a variety of works in novels, essays, short stories, and plays. He was also an active participant in the civil rights movement during the 1960s.