I don’t believe in the school of hard knocks, although I’ve had them. All that stuff about whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is so not true. Do you know what makes you stronger? When people treat you and your art with dignity.

I believe that God put us in this jolly world to be happy and enjoy life.

What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance.

Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.

Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.

We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression.

They say miracles are past.

I am prepared to resort to anything, to submit to anything, for the sake of the commonwealth.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it’s perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God.

When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself.

People want to tear me down, they were going to knife me anyway.

I liked his ability to deal with a lot of the negativity that surrounded him. Even though he was in a world that he didn’t want to be in, he still saw the bigger picture.

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

People define Christianity differently. I think a large portion of our population are Christians, they’re not all growing in their faith, they’re not all active, but I believe that a lot of people believe in Jesus and believe that he is their Lord and Savior.

I can’t jump the highest. I’m obviously not the biggest, not the strongest.

Someone said to me, ‚If fifty percent of the experts in Hollywood said you had no talent and should give up, what would you do?‘ My answer was then and still is, ‚If a hundred percent told me that, all one hundred percent would be wrong.‘

He who conquers others is strong; He who conquers himself is mighty.

There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

There may sometimes be ungenerous attempts to keep a young man down; and they will succeed, too, if he allows his mind to be diverted from its true channel to brood over the attempted injury.

I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.

Better to die ten thousand deaths than wound my honor.

If you can’t make it better, you can laugh at it.

When I was writing ‚Kitchen Confidential,‘ I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.

About the time we can make the ends meet, somebody moves the ends.

My mum passing away wasn’t funny, but that funeral and what I went through, the things that happened, looking back at it, there were funny moments. You have to be strong enough to look back at it, to sit and assess the situation.

Happiness doesn’t come from being rich, nor merely from being successful in your career, nor by self-indulgence. One step towards happiness is to make yourself healthy and strong while you are a boy so that you can be useful and so you can enjoy life when you are a man.

Now, God be praised, that to believing souls gives light in darkness, comfort in despair.

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

Our peace shall stand as firm as rocky mountains.

Courage is being scared to death… and saddling up anyway.

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate… but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.

Just because something didn’t work out your way, or somebody disappointed you, that does not change who you are.

If some people have the belief or view that the Dalai Lama has some miracle power, that’s totally nonsense.

I just really believe people have to get hungry. I think maybe what we need to do, instead of trying to stuff our beliefs down people’s throats, is just pray for them to really be hungry and to see their neediness.

I got the stern end of the stick. It was kind of that iron fist. I am who I am today because of my mother.

When people are very damaged, they can often meet the world with a kind of defiance.

I knew through the surgeries that he was on my side and that this wasn’t something where I was gonna feel less of a woman, because my husband wasn’t gonna let that happen.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

I’m amazed sometimes by the Christians who don’t really believe that God wants to help them and bless them.

You know, God will give favor to anyone who will believe Him. Every day you should confess that you have favor everywhere you go. God will begin to open doors that you wouldn’t believe.

Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth… That’s the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.

I’ve had a lot of success; I’ve had failures, so I learn from the failure.

There is an afterlife. I am convinced of this.

Violent men have not been known in history to die to a man. They die up to a point.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven’t and don’t.

Clinicians, academicians, and politicians are often put to a test of faith. In pursuit of their goals, will their religion show or will it be hidden? Are they tied back to God or to man?

Next to God we are nothing. To God we are Everything.

The more I see of deer, the more I admire them as mountaineers. They make their way into the heart of the roughest solitudes with smooth reserve of strength, through dense belts of brush and forest encumbered with fallen trees and boulder piles, across canons, roaring streams, and snow-fields, ever showing forth beauty and courage.

And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture.

Americans never quit.

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

I can hear you, the rest of the world can hear you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

We are twice armed if we fight with faith.

Gold was a gift to Jesus. If it’s good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me!

Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.

Prayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening.