Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

Read a record number of books in a given month. If you’re focused on intellectual growth, train yourself to study harder and longer than ever before.

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.

The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.

I never learn anything talking. I only learn things when I ask questions.

Why go through life if you’re not going to challenge yourself?

We clearly see in God’s Word that anything He tells us to do, He will give us the ability to do it. But do we really believe it? Do we want to believe it? It’s easier to come up with excuses for why we can’t do things that are hard or that we really don’t want to do.

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast.

I’m crazy and I don’t pretend to be anything else.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

Anything I do, I want to do it well.

Hollywood is not suited for me, and I am not suited for it.

I want to believe that I am improving. This is something that I take really seriously.

Maybe other people will try to limit me but I don’t limit myself.

I am not very good with relationships. With anyone. I can’t be locked up with anyone for too long.

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.

The work is the work. The work is not me.

Fear is not a lasting teacher of duty.

In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

There’s two sorts of fear: one you embrace and one you should listen to and turn the other way.

Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.

I never looked at my mantel and envisioned an MVP trophy sitting there. This is pretty crazy.

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

It’s the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. And once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.

Few people realize that luck is created.

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 confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord’s mercy motivates us to do better.

If someone you know makes a bad decision or uses bad judgment, it doesn’t mean you have to allow that to alter your attitude. Why should you allow anyone else’s bad decisions to send you into a tailspin of misery?

I haven’t changed at all. I’m the same as when I was 11.

I hate to see complacency prevail in our lives when it’s so directly contrary to the teaching of Christ.

I don’t mind people hating me, because it pushes me.

I approach love differently now that I know it’s hard for it to work out.

One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!

One that desires to excel should endeavor in those things that are in themselves most excellent.

Your greatest asset is your earning ability. Your greatest resource is your time.

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

It is a man’s own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.

I’m not arrogant enough to look back on my career and criticize my choices. It’s really not my place.

We will always tend to fulfill our own expectation of ourselves.

To be able to look back upon ones life in satisfaction, is to live twice.

I wasn’t that great a chef, and I don’t think I’m that great a writer.

One of the greatest lessons of my own life was learning to turn the inner rampage of hatred and anger toward my own father for his reprehensible behavior and abandonment of his family into an inner reaction more closely aligned with God and God-realized love.

I have met 18 million youth, and each wants to be unique.

I look at where I’m at today and realize that most of my success is owed to the mentors that was in my life.

Words without actions are the assassins of idealism.

I do the very best I know how – the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.

You have to be willing to go to war with yourself and create a whole new identity.

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.

We should every night call ourselves to an account: what infirmity have I mastered today? what passions opposed? what temptation resisted? what virtue acquired? Our vices will abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.

Think not that humility is weakness; it shall supply the marrow of strength to thy bones. Stoop and conquer; bow thyself and become invincible.

It is our choices… that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

What I love best in life is new starts.

I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.

When I left the University of Notre Dame, I honestly felt I would never coach again.

If you don’t know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it’s kind of hard to put things together.

The greatest mistake we make is living in constant fear that we will make one.