By the time you get dressed, drive out there, play 18 holes and come home, you’ve blown seven hours. There are better things you can do with your time.

The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one’s striving.

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.

Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

Once I realized that right thinking is vital to victorious living, I got more serious about thinking about what I was thinking about, and choosing my thoughts carefully.

Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.

What you put into life is what you get out of it.

When I wake up, I expect things to be good. If they’re not, then I try to set about trying to make them as good as I can ‚cause I know I’m gonna have to live that day anyway. So why not try to make the most of it if you can? Some days, they pan out a little better than others, but you still gotta always just try.

Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn’t do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.

An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

Good intentions never change anything. They only become a deeper and deeper rut.

Mine is better than ours.

I want people to draw strength from me.

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions – for the fun of it – then one day you’ll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!

In golf, the player, coach and official are rolled into one, and they overlap completely. Golf really is the best microcosm of life – or at least the way life should be.

Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time.

I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for.

Correcting bad habits cannot be done by forbidding or punishment.

If you sit there and have that mentality of ‚triple down on what you’re good at,‘ you’re never going to grow. You’re always going to stay the same.

People always tell you, ‚Be humble. Be humble.‘ When was the last time someone told you to be amazing? Be great! Be great! Be awesome! Be awesome!

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

I feel confident imposing change on myself. It’s a lot more fun progressing than looking back. That’s why I need to throw curve balls.

Be not simply good – be good for something.

We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

We should take care not to make the intellect our goal; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

It’s like a muscle – if you stop going to the gym or stop running, you get weak. The military teaches you these great values, but we don’t keep up the discipline on our own, and we lose it. So wherever you go, keep that discipline up.

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.

Your big opportunity may be right where you are now.

If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.

I’m not a person that socializes very well.

Many years ago, I concluded that a few hair shirts were part of the mental wardrobe of every man. The president differs from other men in that he has a more extensive wardrobe.

Critics only make you stronger. You have to look at what they are saying as feedback. Sometimes the feedback helps, and other times, it’s just noise that can be a distraction.

We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.

It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.

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

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

I intend to inspire people with my story: motivate young people that grew up like myself, or even not like myself. Just, you know, go through the human experience.

There are two ways of being happy: We must either diminish our wants or augment our means – either may do – the result is the same and it is for each man to decide for himself and to do that which happens to be easier.

The more nobly a man wills and acts, the more avid he becomes for great and sublime aims to pursue. He will no longer be content with family, country, and the remunerative aspect of his work. He will want wider organisations to create, new paths to blaze, causes to uphold, truths to discover, an ideal to cherish and defend.

Devote each day to the object then in time and every evening will find something done.

I am so busy doing nothing… that the idea of doing anything – which as you know, always leads to something – cuts into the nothing and then forces me to have to drop everything.

Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.

Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death.

Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.

The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride.

What consumerism really is, at its worst is getting people to buy things that don’t actually improve their lives.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.

To put it bluntly, I seem to have a whole superstructure with no foundation. But I’m working on the foundation.

Nobody can give you wiser advice than yourself.

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.