“...stooping very low, He engraves with careHis Name, indelible, upon our dust;And from the ashes of our self-despair,Kindles a flame of hope and humble trust.He seeks no second site on which to build,But on the old foundation, stone by stone,Cementing sad experience with grace,Fashions a stronger temple of His own.”

“The Holy Scriptures were not givento us that we should enclose them in books, but that we should engrave them upon our hearts.”

“The thing I got to thinking about,' he said, 'is--what are the conditions that lead to larger portions of society being generous, humble, and selfless? While we have the conditions for economic opportunity here--and that is a blessing--do we have the conditions to learn how to self-regulate our own passions for the good of the whole?”

“If men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples -- temples which we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our fathers honor, or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only.”

“Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world. ”

“Second only to dedicated temples, our homes are to be sacred edifices of the Lord, places of peace and holiness and sanctity.”

“No one can attain to truth by himself. Only by laying stone on stone with the cooperation of all, by the millions of generations from our forefather Adam to our own times, is that temple reared which is to be a worthy dwelling place of the Great God.”