The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

I always have to be writing.

Why regret anything? Where does it get you to regret anything you’ve ever done in your life? It gets you nowhere. It’s a pathetic emotion that you can wallow in.

You will find as you grow older that courage is the rarest of all qualities to be found in public life.

We all sort of do want incentives for creative people to still exist at a certain level. You know, maybe rock stars shouldn’t make as much; who knows? But you want as much creativity to take place in the future as took place in the past.

I am not afraid of saying something and going and pursuing it. That’s it. I see it in my mind. I say it out loud. I go and do it.

Maxim for life: You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.

The older I get, the more important the eternal becomes to me personally.

If we don’t plant the right things, we will reap the wrong things. It goes without saying. And you don’t have to be, you know, a brilliant biochemist and you don’t have to have an IQ of 150. Just common sense tells you to be kind, ninny, fool. Be kind.

Policies are many, Principles are few, Policies will change, Principles never do.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.

We are America, second to none, and we own the finish line. Don’t forget it.

We proved that we are still a people capable of doing big things and tackling our biggest challenges.

I think there’s every reason this 21st century will be much happier.

Prison was the best thing that ever happened to me.

To create something you must be something.

Yes, and I can sit down on a white piece of paper and work because I don’t believe too much into inspiration, only I’m waiting for inspiration, work and then inspiration may come. It’s a little too easy to say that.

I didn’t know how to deal with success. If there was a Rock Star 101, I would have liked to take it. It might have helped me.

If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.

I don’t mind people hating me, because it pushes me.

If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I’d still swim. And I’d despise the one who gave up.

I was not a good student. I did not spend much time at college; I was too busy enjoying myself.

Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn’t write, I would stop breathing.

Nothing in the world is irreversible, not even capitalism.

Being too good is apt to be uninteresting.

It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren’t doing.

Art is going to make a bigger comeback than ever. That’s the upside to things getting challenging.

Never let yesterday use up too much of today.

I think I could go away tomorrow. I’ve already accomplished something. It’s such a selfish business that sometimes I get sick of myself.

To me, my house is always recreating what I lost in youth.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

I’m not afraid to make mistakes.

Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.

There is no failure except in no longer trying.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

I think it’s quite great to set yourself a big challenge, and then you’ve got another reason for keeping fit.

The important thing is that your teammates have to know you’re pulling for them and you really want them to be successful.

I even found it difficult to watch myself playing on TV because I couldn’t identify with the person on the screen. I couldn’t get to grips with it. It was as if it was all happening to someone else.

Finite to fail, but infinite to venture.

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

I feel matured in a way that I’m happy about. I’m at this other stage in my life – and it’s not a bad thing at all.

Characters do not change. Opinions alter, but characters are only developed.

I would like to be remembered as someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.

You can change your world by changing your words… Remember, death and life are in the power of the tongue.

My dad always said, ‚Champ, the measure of a man is not how often he is knocked down, but how quickly he gets up.‘

I used to let other people’s struggles affect my happiness. If they weren’t happy, there was no way I was going to be happy. The opposite was also true: If I wasn’t happy, I didn’t want anyone around me to be happy.

When you begin to worry, go find something to do. Get busy being a blessing to someone; do something fruitful. Talking about your problem or sitting alone, thinking about it, does no good; it serves only to make you miserable. Above all else, remember that worrying is totally useless. Worrying will not solve your problem.

Read a record number of books in a given month. If you’re focused on intellectual growth, train yourself to study harder and longer than ever before.

On the field, aggression can sometimes be a positive emotion. It boosts performance and can lift your game. But over the years, I have learnt that restrained aggression is a better animal. That way, you will conserve your energy and won’t spend yourself quickly.

You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.

There is no substitute for victory.

When you get to a place where you understand that love and belonging, your worthiness, is a birthright and not something you have to earn, anything is possible.

The schools ain’t what they used to be and never was.

Pick the day. Enjoy it – to the hilt. The day as it comes. People as they come… The past, I think, has helped me appreciate the present – and I don’t want to spoil any of it by fretting about the future.

As a father, I always want my son to be perfect. When he was young, I tried to train him in martial arts, but he said, ‚I don’t want to become like Bruce Lee’s son, with everybody telling me how good my father was.‘ I just think my son is too lazy.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Some people have a hard time getting rid of stuff. If that’s you, pray for God to give you the courage to get rid of things you don’t really need or things He wants you to give away. This will help keep your surroundings organized and clutter-free.

Those who know me know I’m passionate about lists, and top of my list of priorities is my family. My wife Joan and I do not consider our legacy to our children to be wealth or fame but the opportunity to pursue happiness by following their own path.