Quotes about Self-reliance

Sometimes the worst conditions can often provide the best atmosphere to act in faith. God doesn't want our confidence regulated by our audience. If faith-discouragers can shake our confidence badly enough to disable us, our confidence may be in ourselves instead of God.

If you've lived your life looking for someone to take care of you but you always end up taking care of everyone else, your search is over. God has what you need, and you'll never wear Him out.

Each person should examine his own work … not in respect to someone else. For each person will have to carry his own load. Galatians 6:4—5

The power to take charge was in my hands; all I had to do was believe it.

You can not live your life just based on what everyone else thinks.

The "do-it-yourself" rage is spreading everywhere, and people are being told that to be happy all they have to do is think "happy thoughts." Such thoughts might cheer us, but they will never change us.

Parents do overindulge their children, giving them a profusion of material things . . . without the stabilizing effects of earning one's way, of making decisions, of sweating hard to attain some kind of goal, young people are grievously handicapped.

Learn how to collect manna for yourself. Christians who rely on a weekly sermon to feed themselves are probably malnourished.

At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.

At Hampton I not only learned that it was not a disgrace to labour, but learned to love labour, not alone for its financial value, but for labour's own sake and for the independence and self-reliance which the ability to do something which the world wants done brings. At that institution I got my first taste of what it meant to live a life of unselfishness, my first knowledge of the fact that the happiest individuals are those who do the most to make others useful and happy.

Cast down your bucket where you are.

After having been for a while at Hampton, I found myself in difficulty because I did not have books and clothing. Usually, however, I got around the trouble about books by borrowing from those who were more fortunate than myself.