A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them.

The spirit of man is more important than mere physical strength, and the spiritual fiber of a nation than its wealth.

What we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us.

College isn’t in everyone’s hearts. I am living proof, though, that school doesn’t mess up your plans. It gives you more experiences to write about.

Ordinary riches can be stolen; real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.

I try to not focus on what people expect from me.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.

What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.

When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up.

A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.

What I want for my fans and for the world, for anyone who feels pain, is to lean into that pain and embrace it as much as they can and begin the healing process.

If a man empties his purse into his head, no one can take it from him.

If you start by promising what you don’t even have yet, you’ll lose your desire to work towards getting it.

I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self.

Fear is exciting for me.

I owe my solitude to other people.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

I never sell a book. I sell myself. And the way to sell yourself is to be an instrument of love.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

Be as you wish to seem.

Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.

We learn martial arts as helping weakness. You never fight for people to get hurt. You’re always helping people.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

Will power is to the mind like a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders a lame man who can see.

He who does not think much of himself is much more esteemed than he imagines.

I don’t have emotional needs, only physical ones.

I read everything, but generally more fact than fiction – especially autobiographies and biographies. I’ve read ‚Long Walk to Freedom‘ by Nelson Mandela at least twice on holiday. Every time, I’m totally awed by his vision, strength and forgiveness. I feel honoured to have got to know him and his wonderful wife Graca over the years.

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

I was a housewife, so I learned to write in times off, and I don’t think I ever gave it up, though there were times when I was very discouraged because I began to see that the stories I was writing were not very good, that I had a lot to learn, and that it was a much, much harder job than I had expected.

Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

Everyone has been in love, at some point or another.

What a blind person needs is not a teacher but another self.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

What is true belongs to me!

I’m a decent cook; I’m a decent chef. None of my friends would ever have hired me at any point in my career. Period.

Freedom is not given to us by anyone; we have to cultivate it ourselves. It is a daily practice… No one can prevent you from being aware of each step you take or each breath in and breath out.

Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

When a person is going through hell, and she encounters someone who went through hellish hell and survived, then she can say, ‚Mine is not so bad as all that. She came through, and so can I.‘

I don’t want followers.

Control your own destiny! Control your own destiny!

I don’t like to read things that people write about me. I’d rather read what kids have to say about me because it’s not their profession to do that.

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.

Imagine your family finally making it from nothing to something, and finally getting things going, and finally buying a beautiful house and taking care of your children – and the next day, it’s completely all gone. Zero. Boom. Flat broke. So that’s when I had to man up.

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

Most of us have far more courage than we ever dreamed we possessed.

He who speaks without modesty will find it difficult to make his words good.

For some reason I did something where I realized I could get a reaction. That was when I broke out of my shell at school, because I really didn’t have any friends or anything like that and I just kind of was going along, and then finally I did this zany thing, and all of a sudden I had tons of friends.

I will praise any man that will praise me.

In college, a loss is pretty devastating. That feeling kind of goes away in an 82-game season. You hate to lose, but you also have a lot more games to make up for it.

Words are powerful; if you change your words, you can change your life.

I haven’t been faithful to my own advice in the past. I will in the future.

What I love best in life is new starts.

In acting, you have to pull from real-life situations, from people, to help develop a character.

God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.