Doing what you love is the cornerstone of having abundance in your life.

Start your diet during a period of optimism and happiness.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

A really great talent finds its happiness in execution.

I’m living a dream I never want to wake up from.

People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that’s pretty much all you can ask.

It’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.

There has to be something in every role that interests you.

It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

It was as if all of the happiness, all of the magic of this blissful hour had flowed together into these stirring, bittersweet tones and flowed away, becoming temporal and transitory once more.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

I’m in awe of the universe, but I don’t necessarily believe there’s an intelligence or agent behind it. I do have a passion for the visual in religious rituals, though, even though they may be completely empty and bereft of substance. The incense is powerful and provocative, whether Buddhist or Catholic.

The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.

‚Harry Potter‘ gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else.

I love being in a courtroom.

A mission statement is not something you write overnight… But fundamentally, your mission statement becomes your constitution, the solid expression of your vision and values. It becomes the criterion by which you measure everything else in your life.

I believe God, Jesus, died that we not just go to Heaven but that we excel in this life. I never think you make money your goal… God wants you to excel. Just keep Him in first place, and God will open up doors you never dreamed of.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place. Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

I love my job, but it’s more than that: I need it.

Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.

Be not simply good – be good for something.

Human felicity is produced not as much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen as by little advantages that occur every day.

A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is.

I started out as a poet. I’ve always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

Football (soccer) is a matter of life and death, except more important.

Those who know me know I’m passionate about lists, and top of my list of priorities is my family. My wife Joan and I do not consider our legacy to our children to be wealth or fame but the opportunity to pursue happiness by following their own path.

Experience praises the most happy the one who made the most people happy.

Use power to help people. For we are given power not to advance our own purposes nor to make a great show in the world, nor a name. There is but one just use of power and it is to serve people.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

The purpose of our lives is to be happy.

I believe that God has put gifts and talents and ability on the inside of every one of us. When you develop that and you believe in yourself and you believe that you’re a person of influence and a person of purpose, I believe you can rise up out of any situation.

Nothing is stopping me from doing what I love to do.

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

Physical comforts cannot subdue mental suffering, and if we look closely, we can see that those who have many possessions are not necessarily happy. In fact, being wealthy often brings even more anxiety.

I have learned that only two things are necessary to keep one’s wife happy. First, let her think she’s having her own way. And second, let her have it.

I listen to these comparisons with Cristiano Ronaldo, I’ll be happy and then forget it in five seconds.

Skill is the unified force of experience, intellect and passion in their operation.

There are many things I do where the centre of it is… It’s almost more my humanitarian work than art.

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.

When you are discontent, you always want more, more, more. Your desire can never be satisfied. But when you practice contentment, you can say to yourself, ‚Oh yes – I already have everything that I really need.‘

When I chased after money, I never had enough. When I got my life on purpose and focused on giving of myself and everything that arrived into my life, then I was prosperous.

I’ve had mixtapes that have been better than albums I’ve heard from other artists. I take my time; I put my heart into it.

Smiling is very important. If we are not able to smile, then the world will not have peace. It is not by going out for a demonstration against nuclear missiles that we can bring about peace. It is with our capacity of smiling, breathing, and being peace that we can make peace.

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

The happiness of this life depends less on what befalls you than the way in which you take it.

Beauty is the promise of happiness.

Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered, but a general effect of pleasing impression.

Destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes.

There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work.

Washington is a very easy city for you to forget where you came from and why you got there in the first place.

Your joy comes from how you think, the choices that we make in life.

Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.

Our vision and commitment is towards the country’s progress, its place in the world and the happiness of its people.

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.

As for me, prizes are nothing. My prize is my work.