A man who has no office to go, to I don’t care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no conception.

What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.

Every night on the court I give my all, and if I’m not giving 100 percent, I criticize myself.

What is success? I think it is a mixture of having a flair for the thing that you are doing; knowing that it is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a certain sense of purpose.

This is the mark of a really admirable man: steadfastness in the face of trouble.

The Bible says to ‚fear not,‘ but this doesn’t mean you should never feel scared. It means when you do feel fear, keep going forward and do what you are supposed to do. Or as I like to say, do it afraid.

I always try to do as much as I can do. I’m never a person that does not enough, because I’d regret not doing enough and think I probably could have done more. I probably go too far and have to reel myself back in, which works in some things, and other things it doesn’t work.

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’ve had big record label presidents look me in the face and say, ‚Your music sucks, you don’t know who you are, your music is all over the place, and we don’t know how to market this stuff. Pick a lane and come back to us.‘

Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.

In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm… in the real world all rests on perseverance.

I figured that if I said it enough, I would convince the world that I really was the greatest.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.

As a professional athlete a lot is going to be said about you – but I just try to move forward and try to achieve my goals.

It feels good to have your work respected again.

We should never lose an occasion. Opportunity is more powerful even than conquerors and prophets.

Show me the man you honor, and I will know what kind of man you are.

I’ve written some great things. That’s a gift, but there’s consequences. Yeah, you get this great work, but you suffer. You really, really suffer.

Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning.

When we tackle obstacles, we find hidden reserves of courage and resilience we did not know we had. And it is only when we are faced with failure do we realise that these resources were always there within us. We only need to find them and move on with our lives.

Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.

People just don’t understand how obsessed I am with winning.

Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even.

The longer a man’s fame is likely to last, the longer it will be in coming.

I don’t think I am evangelical in my work.

I don’t think about that. I wasn’t a kid growing up saying one day I’ll get an Oscar and make a speech. That wasn’t on my mind. So what I do is the best work I can do.

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.

We are not retreating – we are advancing in another direction.

Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me.

When something an affliction happens to you, you either let it defeat you, or you defeat it.

Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.

He that lives upon hope will die fasting.

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we’d been saying they were.

I never expect to lose. Even when I’m the underdog, I still prepare a victory speech.

It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get to where we are today, but we have just begun. Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

Unwearied ceaseless effort is the price that must be paid for turning faith into a rich infallible experience.

To succeed in your mission, you must have single-minded devotion to your goal.

Keep a good attitude and do the right thing even when it’s hard. When you do that you are passing the test. And God promises you your marked moments are on their way.

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

I think it all comes down to motivation. If you really want to do something, you will work hard for it.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: ‚Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?‘ They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself. Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them.

Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.

A clever, ugly man every now and then is successful with the ladies, but a handsome fool is irresistible.

We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.

The artists of the past who impressed me were the ones who really focused their work.

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

If a man knows not what harbor he seeks, any wind is the right wind.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

I used to feel unsafe right in the moment of an accomplishment – I felt the ground fall from under my feet because this could be the end. And even now, while everyone is celebrating, I’m on to the next thing. I don’t want to get lost in this big cushion of success.

Today we did what we had to do. They counted on America to be passive. They counted wrong.

Hey, I think it’s easy for guys to hit .300 and stay in the big leagues. Hit .200 and try to stick around as long as I did; I think it’s a much greater accomplishment. That’s hard.

A man can do only what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day.

Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine.

Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.

I’ve always been an underdog. I feel like I beat the odds.