For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.

What is a fear of living? It’s being preeminently afraid of dying. It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity and spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility for yourself – for the time you take up and the space you occupy. If you don’t know what you’re here to do, then just do some good.

If you don’t like what you’re doing, then don’t do it.

I’m not well-read, but when I read, I read well.

You might not always get what you want, but you always get what you expect.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.

I learned a long time ago how to be coachable.

In the book of Gaga, fame is in your heart, fame is there to comfort you, to bring you self-confidence and worth whenever you need it.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent dead wood.

If you start by promising what you don’t even have yet, you’ll lose your desire to work towards getting it.

The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.

God always wants us to be growing.

I didn’t go to university. Didn’t even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.

By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.

What a blind person needs is not a teacher but another self.

Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world.

You can live your life angry, bitter, mad at somebody or even guilty, not letting go of your own mistakes, but you won’t receive the good things God has in store.

There are more men ennobled by study than by nature.

You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight.

We forge the chains we wear in life.

I cry so much less than I used to. I used to be one of the most teary people.

Oh, God, I struggle with low self-esteem all the time! I think everyone does. I have so much wrong with me, it’s unbelievable!

The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.

Most people want to avoid pain, and discipline is usually painful.

Passions are vices or virtues to their highest powers.

It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

We must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed toward attaining it.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.

Prayer doesn’t just change things – it changes us. If we are diligent in seeking God, slowly and surely we become better people.

Books are sharks… because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.

There are many things that happen every day that we could murmur about if we let ourselves go there. But they really aren’t worth the effort it takes to get upset and gripe about it.

I think the great part about what I do is that there’s a scoreboard. At the end of every week, you know how you did. You know how well you prepared. You know whether you executed your game plan. There’s a tangible score.

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.

If I’ve got something do. I’m going to attack it. I’m going to attack that stress.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.

If anything is good for pounding humility into you permanently, it’s the restaurant business.

Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.

I’m responsible for starting a whole new school of pretension.

To deal with individual human needs at the everyday level can be noble sometimes.

Poverty must not be a bar to learning and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

No one gets away with anything, ever, so take responsibility for your own life.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

If virtue promises happiness, prosperity and peace, then progress in virtue is progress in each of these for to whatever point the perfection of anything brings us, progress is always an approach toward it.

He who does not think much of himself is much more esteemed than he imagines.

Does anybody really think that they didn’t get what they had because they didn’t have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment?

Your success, or lack of success, is your responsibility. Even when you have a chain of command that you don’t like as well, its your responsibility to work with the up chain of command.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

I was never particularly fond of my voice.

A great man is always willing to be little.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

I read the ‚Old Testament‘ all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read ‚The Origin Of Species‘, hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.

Don’t gain the world and lose your soul; wisdom is better than silver or gold.

Keep your nose out the sky, keep your heart to god, and keep your face to the raising sun.

In the dime stores and bus stations, people talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.