Quotes about Challenge

If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It's the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.

The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time.

I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much.

If you even dream of beating me you'd better wake up and apologize.

I'll beat him so bad he'll need a shoehorn to put his hat on.

Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.

Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even.

The greatest tragedy in life is not death but life without a purpose—life with the wrong priorities. Life's greatest challenge is in knowing what to do. The greatest mistake in life is to be busy but not effective. Life's greatest failure is to be successful in the wrong assignment. Success in life is measured by the effective use of one's time.

Successful resistance to temptation may result in an increase of moral muscle, but that is because one is going to need it. A temptation resisted may become more, not less, fierce.

Author says writing about Jesus is difficult because it is like writing about a friend "who is still liable to surprise us.

Part of John's meaning of the cross, then, is that it is not only what happens, purely pragmatically, when God's kingdom challenges Caesar's kingdom. It is also what has to happen if God's kingdom, which makes its way (as Jesus insists) by nonviolence rather than by violence, is to win the day.

How much easier to produce moral musings than present the fresh challenge of the kingdom!