The greatest enemy to human souls is the self-righteous spirit which makes men look to themselves for salvation.

Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties.

Men know not the gold which lies in the mine of Christ Jesus, or surely they would dig in it night and day. They have not yet discovered the pearl of great price, or they would have sold their all to buy the field wherein it lies.

Saving faith is an immediate relation to Christ, accepting, receiving, resting upon Him alone, for justification, sanctification, and eternal life by virtue of God's grace.

All the goodness I have within me is totally from the Lord alone. When I sin, it is from me and is done on my own, but when I act righteously, it is wholly and completely of God.

'You are no saint,' says the devil. Well, if I am not, I am a sinner, and Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. Sink or swim, I go to Him; other hope, I have none.

It is a most delightful reflection that if I come to the throne of God in prayer, I may feel a thousand defects, but yet there is hope. I usually feel more dissatisfied with my prayers than with anything else I do.

In prayer, we stand where angels bow with veiled faces. There, even there, the cherubim and seraphim adore before that selfsame throne to which our prayers ascend. And shall we come there with stunted requests and narrow, contracted faith?

Grow in the root of all grace, which is faith. Believe God's promises more firmly than ever. Allow your faith to increase in its fullness, firmness, and simplicity.

However weak we are, however poor, however little our faith, or however small our grace may be, our names are still written on His heart; nor shall we lose our share in Jesus' love.

To every soul that knows how to pray, to every soul that by faith comes to Jesus, the true mercy seat, divine sovereignty wears no dark and terrible aspect but is full of love.

Now I will say this to every sinner, though he should think himself to be the worst sinner who ever lived: cry to the Lord and seek Him while He may be found. A throne of grace is a place fitted for you. By simple faith, go to your Savior, for He is the throne of grace.

When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, 'Nah, what's wrong with a horse?' That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.

If you're trying to create a company, it's like baking a cake. You have to have all the ingredients in the right proportion.

It's OK to have your eggs in one basket as long as you control what happens to that basket.

I don't create companies for the sake of creating companies, but to get things done.

Automotive franchise laws were put in place decades ago to prevent a manufacturer from unfairly opening stores in direct competition with an existing franchise dealer that had already invested time, money and effort to open and promote their business.

You need to be in the position where it is the cost of the fuel that actually matters and not the cost of building the rocket in the first place.

I don't think it's a good idea to plan to sell a company.

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative.

Really, the only thing that makes sense is to strive for greater collective enlightenment.

I think it's very important to have a feedback loop, where you're constantly thinking about what you've done and how you could be doing it better. I think that's the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

I do love email. Wherever possible I try to communicate asynchronously. I'm really good at email.

The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad.

I'm glad to see that BMW is bringing an electric car to market. That's cool.

Rockets are cool. There's no getting around that.

I would like to fly in space. Absolutely. That would be cool. I used to just do personally risky things, but now I've got kids and responsibilities, so I can't be my own test pilot. That wouldn't be a good idea. But I definitely want to fly as soon as it's a sensible thing to do.

There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

If something's important enough, you should try. Even if you - the probable outcome is failure.

The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we're not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.

When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.

I wouldn't say I have a lack of fear. In fact, I'd like my fear emotion to be less because it's very distracting and fries my nervous system.

In the early days of aviation, there was a great deal of experimentation and a high death rate.

Mars is the only place in the solar system where it's possible for life to become multi-planetarian.

You could warm Mars up, over time, with greenhouse gases.

If you get up in the morning and think the future is going to be better, it is a bright day. Otherwise, it's not.

I'm interested in things that change the world or that affect the future and wondrous, new technology where you see it, and you're like, 'Wow, how did that even happen? How is that possible?'

The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it's going to become multiplanetary, or it's going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there's going to be an extinction event.

There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What's the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.

I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It's a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that's what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.

If humanity doesn't land on Mars in my lifetime, I would be very disappointed.

I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness to make sure it continues into the future.

In order for us to have a future that's exciting and inspiring, it has to be one where we're a space-bearing civilization.

I'm reasonably optimistic about the future, especially the future of the United States - for the century, at least.

It's not as though we can keep burning coal in our power plants. Coal is a finite resource, too. We must find alternatives, and it's a better idea to find alternatives sooner then wait until we run out of coal, and in the meantime, put God knows how many trillions of tons of CO2 that used to be buried underground into the atmosphere.

Great companies are built on great products.

SpaceX has the potential of saving the U.S. government $1 billion a year. We are opposed to creating an entrenched monopoly with no realistic means for anyone to compete.

Government isn't that good at rapid advancement of technology. It tends to be better at funding basic research. To have things take off, you've got to have commercial companies do it.

We're running the most dangerous experiment in history right now, which is to see how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere... can handle before there is an environmental catastrophe.

If anyone thinks they'd rather be in a different part of history, they're probably not a very good student of history. Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You'd probably have no teeth by now. It would be particularly awful if you were a woman.