Finite to fail, but infinite to venture.

When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.

The difficulties you meet will resolve themselves as you advance. Proceed, and light will dawn, and shine with increasing clearness on your path.

I pity the fool who just gives up.

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

If you look at anyone who has achieved great success and wealth, people like Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, or Lance Armstrong, they have all focused intensely in order to win.

See, winners embrace hard work.

I’m not looking for sympathy at all.

Failure means a stripping away of the inessential.

My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.

A big ego means that you have some confidence in your abilities, really, and that you’re prepared to take the risk of trying them out.

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that’s real power.

I believe that one person can make a difference.

A really great talent finds its happiness in execution.

We need to steer clear of this poverty of ambition, where people want to drive fancy cars and wear nice clothes and live in nice apartments but don’t want to work hard to accomplish these things. Everyone should try to realize their full potential.

I have been up against tough competition all my life. I wouldn’t know how to get along without it.

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

To those of you who received honours, awards and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say you, too, can be president of the United States.

It is not God’s will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.

Only by contending with challenges that seem to be beyond your strength to handle at the moment you can grow more surely toward the stars.

Change is always tough. Even for those who see themselves as agents of change, the process of starting a new thing can cause times of disorientation, uncertainty and insecurity.

Being self-made means never making an excuse as to why you can’t take steps toward whatever your goal is.

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

The great end of life is not knowledge but action.

I loved photography and everybody said it was a crazy thing to do because in those days nobody made it into the film business. I mean, unless you were related to somebody there was no way in.

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

Listen; there’s a hell of a good universe next door: let’s go.

The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there… and still on your feet.

Unwearied ceaseless effort is the price that must be paid for turning faith into a rich infallible experience.

Begin – to begin is half the work, let half still remain; again begin this, and thou wilt have finished.

In soloing – as in other activities – it is far easier to start something than it is to finish it.

And die of nothing but a rage to live.

However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

With audacity one can undertake anything, but not do everything.

To live without Hope is to Cease to live.

I write for the same reason I breathe – because if I didn’t, I would die.

For a long time, I had the idea that I would do a certain amount of work the best I could, and then I would reach a comfort zone, and I wouldn’t be pushed to write more. I would become a different person. It’s a surprise to me that this hasn’t happened. Your body ages, but your mind is the same.

Deficiency motivation doesn’t work. It will lead to a life-long pursuit of try to fix me. Learn to appreciate what you have and where and who you are.

You have enough people against you… be for yourself.

The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

Must is a hard nut to crack, but it has a sweet kernel.

Since day one, since the first time I touched the pen, I wanted to be the best at what I do.

I was brought up as an only child, and we were very close. But when I was 14, we got evicted. We came home to a padlock, and I looked up at my mom and she was crying, and there was nothing to do.

There is no failure except in no longer trying.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

Don’t compare yourself with other people; compare yourself with who you were yesterday.

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.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

My pride fell with my fortunes.

Let us be sure that those who come after will say of us in our time, that in our time we did everything that could be done. We finished the race; we kept them free; we kept the faith.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

Everything negative – pressure, challenges – is all an opportunity for me to rise.

I’ll never make it, it will never happen, because they’re never going to hear me ‚cause they’re screaming all the time.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.

However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them?

My life is a struggle.