Every time I think that I’m getting old, and gradually going to the grave, something else happens.

I come from – I came from Wales, and it’s a strong, butch society. We were in the war and all that. People didn’t waste time feeling sorry for themselves. You had to get on with it. So my credo is get on with it. I don’t waste time being soft. I’m not cold, but I don’t like being, wasting my time with – life’s too short.

The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

First ask yourself: What is the worst that can happen? Then prepare to accept it. Then proceed to improve on the worst.

Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you’d never complete your life, would you? You’d never wholly know you.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

The difference between us and them, between you and success, is not that you never fail, but it’s how you recover from those failures – is that you keep getting up time and time again. You figure out what you did wrong, and then you make it right. I say that to my kids every day.

In fact, my courage and my bravery at a young age was the thing I was bullied for, a kind of ‚Who do you think you are?‘

Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.

I can handle pain.

Mentally, the only players who survive in the pros are the ones able to manage all their responsibilities. Everybody struggles in different ways.

My life is a struggle.

Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.

That last day does not bring extinction to us, but change of place.

Losing is tough.

A tomb now suffices him for whom the whole world was not sufficient.

Ethiopia didn’t just blow my mind; it opened my mind. Anyway, on our last day at this orphanage a man handed me his baby and said, ‚Would you take my son with you?‘ He knew, in Ireland, that his son would live, and that in Ethiopia, his son would die.

So, for example, a country was into recession right after I was sworn in, a dot-com bust had taken place. Then the attacks of September the 11th, and then of course the great financial meltdown in the -the fundamental question facing any presidency is how do you deal with the hand you’re dealt?

Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth… That’s the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.

I think it’s good for a woman to put on a bit of weight when she gets older – it looks better. But a man has to stay balanced.

Nothing can resist the person who smiles at life – I don’t mean the ironic and disillusioned smile of my grandfather, but the triumphant smile of the person who knows that he will survive, or that at least he will be saved by what seems to be destroying him.

Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.

During bad circumstances, which is the human inheritance, you must decide not to be reduced. You have your humanity, and you must not allow anything to reduce that. We are obliged to know we are global citizens. Disasters remind us we are world citizens, whether we like it or not.

‚Suffering should not make us bitter people,‘ my mother once said, ‚it should make us better comforters.‘ Young people need to hear this from those who have walked before them, because someday they’ll be walking those same steps, but there may not be anyone following behind.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

It was easy being healthy when I was young. I was full of energy, so sports and physical challenges were fun. But as I got older and the spring left my step, exercise became harder, and eating, drinking and watching TV became easier. By the time I was 50, I’d put on 50 pounds.

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about dying, but I like to think that I’ve – if it did occur – that I would die peacefully and not make too much of a fuss about it.

I went through every emotion with tryna pursue what I’m doing, you know what I mean? And I think what’s gon‘ separate whoever’s gon go for something, that you ain’t gon‘ quit.

Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

Sometimes in the past when I played something might make me lose focus, or I would go home after a game where I thought I could have played better and I would let it hang over my head for a long time when it shouldn’t.

I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature.

Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition – such as lifting weights – we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity.

You not supposed to feel down over whatever happen to you. I mean, you’re supposed to use whatever happen to you as some type of upper, not a downer.

But for me to have the opportunity to stand in front of a bunch of executives and present myself, I had to hustle in my own way. I can’t tell you how frustrating it was that they didn’t get that. No joke – I’d leave meetings crying all the time.

Women, like men, should try to do the impossible. And when they fail, their failure should be a challenge to others.

When things are really dismal, you can laugh, or you can cave in completely.

In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.

We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.

When I was young, I could not imagine being old. My mother said, and the doctor confirmed, that I had an unusual amount of energy; and it followed me into young adulthood.

Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up.

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.

Fear, separation, hate and anger come from the wrong view that you and the Earth are two separate entities, the Earth is only the environment. You are in the centre and you want to do something for the Earth in order for you to survive. That is a dualistic way of seeing.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

Marines don’t know how to spell the word ‚defeat‘.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

In a universe that’s an intelligent system with a divine creative force supporting it, there simply can be no accidents. As tough as it is to acknowledge, you had to go through what you went through in order to get to where you are today, and the evidence is that you did.

Under the worst conditions, horrendous conditions, people still, you know, fight for their rights and don’t just succumb.

It doesn’t matter if the water is cold or warm if you’re going to have to wade through it anyway.

Everyone has his day and some days last longer than others.

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.

When it all got taken away, I was becoming a young man. So I had to sacrifice to leave my family… Sleeping in my car, getting an apartment for a month and getting evicted the next month. Staying in the $25, $50 hotels.

I think it’s very important to cry in the shower and not in front of them. They need to know that everything’s going to be all right, even when you’re not sure it is.

The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It’s rage, it’s creativity, it’s pain, it’s hurt, but it’s the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music.