Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

With patient and firm determination, I am going to press on for jobs. I’m going to press on for equality. I’m going to press on for the sake of our children. I’m going to press on for the sake of all those families who are struggling right now. I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I am going to press on.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

Satan wants us to constantly focus on everything that is wrong with us and look at how far we still have to go. But God desires for us to rejoice in how far we have already come.

Don’t ever play yourself.

I still learn, but I think it’s the best thing in life to have a kid.

I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about theology. Most of my knowledge comes out of my experience and the lessons in the Bible. Every Sunday I’m home I teach 45 minutes and we boiled them down to one page for the new book, ‚Through the Year with Jimmy Carter.‘

Quality is not an act, it is a habit.

Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.

Let go of offence. Let go of fear. Let go of revenge. Don’t live angry, let go now!

Once you start doing only what you’ve already proven you can do, you’re on the road to death.

I just have always felt that people don’t change, circumstances change.

So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.

Gain may be temporary and uncertain; but ever while you live, expense is constant and certain: and it is easier to build two chimneys than to keep one in fuel.

As I approve of a youth that has something of the old man in him, so I am no less pleased with an old man that has something of the youth. He that follows this rule may be old in body, but can never be so in mind.

Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.

One thing is certain in business. You and everyone around you will make mistakes.

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

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

I’m always afraid of failing. I have to quiet that fear if I’m going to get up in the morning.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

We can never make ourselves better by trying… praying more or longer, studying more of the Word, performing good works, etc. Don’t get me wrong… it’s not bad to do any of these things. In fact, it’s good. It’s just that doing them in God’s power is the only way those things will have any real and lasting effect in our lives.

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.

No poet or orator has ever existed who believed there was any better than himself.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

In the revolt against idealism, the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived, with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.

The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.

I focus on my own job.

Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

By the time you’ve reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

If you can’t read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

I’m not a regrets-type person.

I wish everyone well, but you need to focus on yourself. You need to stop putting your hand out. Everyone wants hand outs. Everyone wants things for free. You’ve got to put in the work. You’ve got to grind. You’ve got go through the struggle, and you’ve got to get it.

You don’t have the same mentality as you did five years ago – even one year. People are always changing, and I believe that everyone deserves the space to change and for people to recognize their change.

I have an expression I use as I’ve gone around the world through my career: ‚You never tell another man or woman what’s in their interest. They know their interest better than you know their interest.‘

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge.

On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit.

Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.

Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.

Wise men make more opportunities than they find.

When you are asked if you can do a job, tell ‚em, ‚Certainly I can!‘ Then get busy and find out how to do it.

Every step of life shows much caution is required.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfish to seek other than itself.

Someone told me something that stuck with me: ‚You have to envision your life, and then go backwards.‘ I’ve been living by that motto for a while, so I see where I need to be. Now I’m just backtracking and trying to get back up there.

The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages are perpetuated by quotations.

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.

We learn martial arts as helping weakness. You never fight for people to get hurt. You’re always helping people.

No law or ordinance is mightier than understanding.

The proactive approach to a mistake is to acknowledge it instantly, correct and learn from it.

Wise leaders generally have wise counselors because it takes a wise person themselves to distinguish them.