Did you know there’s a difference between being busy and being fruitful? Did you ever stop to think that just being busy – running around in circles all day but not accomplishing anything – is the same as wasting your time? It’s frustrating to expend so much energy and time and not have any fruit from your effort!

There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting.

As a leader, the first person I need to lead is me. The first person that I should try to change is me.

The one who adapts his policy to the times prospers, and likewise that the one whose policy clashes with the demands of the times does not.

I believe you never get tired by doing work. You get tired when you don’t work. When you clean your house, you don’t get tired; it gives you satisfaction.

Preaching is to much avail, but practice is far more effective. A godly life is the strongest argument you can offer the skeptic.

I’m not good at talking about myself.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.

All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.

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.

Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‚That person I see is a savage monster;‘ instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

There is one thing that gets you out of bed in the morning, and that is discipline. Because your dreams and your goals are not there waking up for you in the morning.

Here comes 40. I’m feeling my age and I’ve ordered the Ferrari. I’m going to get the whole mid-life crisis package.

Our lives are a sum total of the choices we have made.

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it.

I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.

If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

I do not love to be printed on every occasion, much less to be dunned and teased by foreigners about mathematical things or to be thought by our own people to be trifling away my time about them when I should be about the king’s business.

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

Small aim is a crime; have great aim.

Our goal is to make it so there’s as little friction as possible to having a social experience.

I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine.

When one has a great deal to put into it a day has a hundred pockets.

I’m perpetually lonely.

There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.

My pride fell with my fortunes.

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

I’m just wanting to make the proper breakfast and keep the house. That’s my passion. At the request of my kids, I’m taking cooking classes. As I go to sleep at night, I think, ‚Did I do a great job as a mom, or was that an average day?‘

There’s a victory, and defeat; the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.

Never take anything for granted.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again – as I always am when I write.

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.

I must govern the clock, not be governed by it.

Many a man thinks he is patient when, in reality, he is indifferent.

You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

We live in a time-crunched world, and just about everything we do seems to be urgent.

You do projects with the hope they will be big and hope they will go beyond what you imagine.

Short cuts make long delays.

One always has time enough, if one will apply it well.

I don’t pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.

I like to combine visits to more than one place when I go on my international tours in order to get more done. I’m from Ahmedabad where we have a saying, ‚Single-fare, double journey.‘

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

I have the Midas touch, in the way that when I hook up with a project, I feel, not speaking cocky or conceited, but there’s a confidence I have. I learned that from Muhammad Ali; I used to bodyguard him. He taught me about confidence. So when it comes to any job I work, I’m gonna do it good; I’m going to bring it over the top.

The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man’s own eyes when they look upon his own person.

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.

Thoughts are fine when you don’t confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are.

Any man can call time out, but no man can say how long the time out will be.

The time when most of you should withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

I am invariably late for appointments – sometimes as much as two hours. I’ve tried to change my ways but the things that make me late are too strong, and too pleasing.

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

Make measurable progress in reasonable time.

I’m a super-duper over-analyzer. You mix that with self-doubt and pressure, and that’s never healthy.

Man the individual consoles himself for his passing with the thought of the offspring or the works which he leaves behind.