Songwriting and poetry are so commonly birthed from underdogs because one can make even the ugliest situations admirable, or more beautiful than the beautiful situations – they are the most graceful media in which the lines of society are distorted.
Treat people like people. Beware of pity and patronization because in them, you can’t see when you’re unashamedly looking down on someone.
The surface of learning is hearing what your ears aren’t prepared to hear, and the core of learning is hearing what your ears don’t want to hear.
Ingredients to success: know what you do well, know what to do well, and know someone who’s swell.
What further helps to reveal reality is when our personal thinking ceases to take reality for granted.
Man was created to glorify God. Now, that may encompass other things which God has planned for each man, but essentially, man was created to glorify God.
The real test of love is loving those who we feel are the hardest ones to love.
If truth is like the terrain, are we the generation who sees it as one who has worn shoes all his life or one who has never worn shoes? Yet still, even if the walk starts out as painful, the experience may be well worth it.
In the end, only God can see the heart of an individual and distinguish the difference between legalistic deadweight and the passion of holy solemnity.
It’s simple, it’s not that simple; or life is simple, but the things in it are not. When a man does not understand it, he tends to inflate it. When he does, he tends to deflate it. In the end, neither images are fully accurate.
In societies where coolness and being cool is a top priority, the religious replace the word ‘religious’ with ‘spiritual’ to make their faiths seem less extreme.
Let what offends God offend me, and what God pardons, I pardon.
Everyone has a natural slant towards seeking themselves. This gets in the way of seeking God unless God intervenes.
Unlike wealth, there is an infinite value in legacy.
People think that fun in Christ is non-existent, but there is fun wherever your heart lives.
It’s easy to make a mess when you’re not the one who has to clean it up.
The 2 extremes, neither one worse than the other: the result of bad religion is self-loathing and violence; the result of bad spirituality is self-worship and narcissism.
A major gap between many of the denominations stems from how people define some of the most basic terms, such as ‘religion’ itself.
Intelligent people, as some say, in their openness, are indeed slow to criticize, but conversely, in their openness to the concerns of others, the genuine are slow to fret about being criticized.
If ever it’s necessary to ride the bandwagon, it’s done with one leg swinging out and eyes scoping the fields.