A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five.

I’m kind of fascist with myself, you know.

‚Worry‘ is a word that I don’t allow myself to use.

Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.

Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

I think you can have 10,000 explanations for failure, but no good explanation for success.

Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.

Live the life you’ve dreamed.

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Somewhere deep down there’s a decent man in me, he just can’t be found.

I want to thank God, obviously for the health, for the talent He’s given me, for my family who supports me, for the things that basketball’s taught me on and off the court. For the people that I’ve been able to meet through the game of basketball.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

Don’t be humble… you’re not that great.

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.

He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.

I just want to be just as everyone else. I want to educate myself and be just like a normal teenager.

Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion.

My whole thing is to inspire, to better people, to better myself forever in this thing that we call rap, this thing that we call hip hop.

For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is.

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.

No one should be ashamed to admit he is wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

What one has to do usually can be done.

I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read ‚Democracy in America‘ by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.

Take things as they are. Punch when you have to punch. Kick when you have to kick.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.

Don’t wait to be successful at some future point. Have a successful relationship with the present moment and be fully present in whatever you are doing. That is success.

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

A great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.

I worked out early on to give up things I couldn’t do well at all.

I want to make a good, solid kung fu movie.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

History will point out some of the things I did wrong and some of the things I did right.

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.

Stand a little less between me and the sun.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

The reward of a thing well done is having done it.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.

Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.

I wasn’t trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn’t have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.

With fame, you know, you can read about yourself, somebody else’s ideas about you, but what’s important is how you feel about yourself – for survival and living day to day with what comes up.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.

Many people think of perfectionism as striving to be your best, but it is not about self-improvement; it’s about earning approval and acceptance.

Whatever good things we build end up building us.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

Nothing is more terrible than to see ignorance in action.

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.

Forty is when you actually begin even deserving to be on stage telling people what you think.

You can’t go backward in life.

Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.

Whenever I’m around some who is modest, I think, ‚Run like hell and all of fire.‘ You don’t want modesty, you want humility.

I’m sure like everyone else I’m not always the happiest if I don’t do a good job in quali or the race or whatever, so I think beating myself up sometimes makes me work harder.

What I’m asking for is hard. It’s easier to be cynical; to accept that change isn’t possible, and politics is hopeless, and to believe that our voices and actions don’t matter. But if we give up now, then we forsake a better future.

I’m afraid to fail again.

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.