Wayne Dyer, motivational speaker and writer, likes to tell an ancient story about a woman who finds a valuable stone in a river. She places the stone in a bag. Later a traveler comes to the woman and ...
Every British monarch is crowned sitting in the Coronation Chair. It is not very impressive. The paint is peeling, showing the marks of earlier paint. The initials of schoolboys are carved on it. ...
At church camp when I was a teenager, an ugly rumor about two of our counselors quickly became the talk of the camp. The next day, at morning prayer, the minister read the story of the adulterous woma...
According to the people at “Ripley’s Believe it or Not,” the cornerstone of the Washington Monument, which was laid on July 4, 1884, disappeared and has never been found. How could...
A story is told of two friends who were walking through the desert. During some point of the journey they had an argument, and one friend slapped the other one in the face. The one who got slapped was...
Socrates wrote: "Could I climb the highest place in Athens, I would lift my voice and proclaim: 'Fellow citizens, why do you turn and scrape every stone to gather wealth, and take so little care of yo...
J. Floyd Jones in the 1958 Word Lectures at Guilford College told of a Maine farmer who built his stone fence four feet wide and three feet high. Why? That way if it blows over it will be better than ...
According to the people at "Ripley's Believe it or Not," the cornerstone of the Washington Monument, which was laid on July 4, 1884, disappeared and has never been found....
In a Preaching magazine sermon called "Easter as an Earthquake," William Willimon concluded with these words: "In the fifties, in China, there was a devastating earthquake. But as a result of the quak...
In J. K. Rowling's now famous novel Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone there is a warning engraved on the doors of the bank: Enter stranger, but take heed - Of what awaits the sin of greed - For t...
At the heart of the city of Indianapolis stands a towering granite monument. About it are clustered statues depicting various scenes from the Civil War. Carved on the stone are these words: "To Indian...
According to Rolling Stone magazine, the last written words of “gonzo” journalist Hunter Thompson were in a note written to his wife, four days before his suicide. The note said: "No More Games. No M...
The city dump. That's what it was that day in 1904 when a young black woman, Mary McCloud Bethune, saw it. Nevertheless, she and other willing hands built a shack on that desolate place, for s...
According to The Executive Speechwriter Newsletter (vol. 12, no. 3), "Desire kept young W. Clement Stone on Chicago's street corners selling newspapers. Desire later made him one of the wealthiest peo...
I love the story Gordon MacDonald tells. Among the legends is the tale of a medieval sidewalk superintendent who asked three stone masons on a construction project what they were doing. The first repl...
Jesus' parable of a man who found buried treasure in a field has had some modern parallels to show that, like all His parables, this one is true to life. In 1820, a Greek farmer on the island of Milos...
Created from Georgia marble and Florida coquina stone, and ornamented with the forms of plants and animals, the Bok Tower in Lake Wales, Florida was built to house a 57-bell carillon. Visitors sit ami...
Sometime after Bernie died, his widow, Rachel, was finally able to speak about what a thoughtful, considerate, and wonderful man her late husband had been. "My Bernie thought of everything", she told ...
An evangelist told the following story in one of his campaigns. He said, "I have a friend who during the depression lost a job, a fortune, a wife, and a home, but tenaciously held to his faith...
It's a fascinating story that comes out of the 1989 earthquake which almost flattened Armenia. This deadly tremor killed over 30,000 people in less than four minutes. In the midst of all the co...