I treated it like every day was my last day with a basketball.

If you tell me there’s something I can’t do, I’ll want to do it even more. Especially when it comes to entertaining.

The trouble with referees is that they know the rules, but they do not know the game.

Dancers are always striving for perfection. A great dancer never achieves it: you always want to do another turn, a higher jump,a more difficult acrobatic jump.

If you hear a voice within you say ‚you cannot paint,‘ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

If you’re going to be a winner in life, you have to constantly go beyond your best.

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

If I wish to compose or write or pray or preach well, I must be angry. Then all the blood in my veins is stirred, and my understanding is sharpened.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

I hit a grand slam off Ron Herbel and when his manager Herman Franks came out to get him, he was bringing Herbel’s suitcase.

If you’ve lost your spirit, even living in the richest country in the world can’t help you become rich.

A lot of football success is in the mind. You must believe you are the best and then make sure that you are.

If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.

We need to internalize this idea of excellence. Not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent.

You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it.

Measure your wealth by what you’d have left if you lost all your money.

If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self.

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day.

The way I figured it, I was even with baseball and baseball with me. The game had done much for me, and I had done much for it.

When I was nine years old, living on the south side of Chicago, my father was a minister and my mother used to scrub floors. I had seven brothers and four sisters. I told my mama, ‚One of these days I’m going to be big and strong and buy you a beautiful house.‘ That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do with my life, is to take care of my mother.

I just kept touring and touring until it became second nature to go onstage, perform, and sing.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

Yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s games.

Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.

What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.

To keep the business going, you gotta keep it boomin‘.

Cows are my passion. What I have ever sighed for has been to retreat to a Swiss farm, and live entirely surrounded by cows – and china.

Through perseverance many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure.

What happens if you stick at something long enough, and study it for so long, you have a different kind of intelligence. It’s not an intellectual thing. It’s almost like an animal intelligence. I call it our form of instinct, almost how a lion knows exactly where its prey is.

It must be quite mysterious to some people why I bother to carry on. Because, you know, I don’t sell that many records.

I don’t know what acting is, but I enjoy it.

Pretty much my whole life, I’ve been a performer and have loved singing and writing songs in my room for my own ears.

My dad has kind of been the standard for me, he played 16 years in the league, and since I’ve been in the league, every year that I go through and deal with the scratches, the bumps and bruises, just the grind that it is to go through one NBA season.

When I do something, I do it full steam ahead.

In my career as a director, there’s always been some point where you get halfway through it, or three-quarters, and you go: ‚What is this thing all about, and why am I telling the story? Does anybody really care about seeing this?‘ At that time you have to say: ‚OK, forget that and just go ahead.‘

Ambition can creep as well as soar.

On ‚Grey’s Anatomy‘ I wouldn’t care what I was playing – I would play a corpse, ‚cause I love it that much. It is deep true love, and it will never die.

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

You will never fulfill your destiny doing work you despise.

A flippant, frivolous man may ridicule others, may controvert them, scorn them; but he who has any respect for himself seems to have renounced the right of thinking meanly of others.

Luck is believing you’re lucky.

The future rewards those who press on. I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I’m going to press on.

We love things we love what they are.

When you seek the presence of your creative Spirit and are filled with passion about virtually everything you undertake, you’ll successfully remove the roadblocks from your life and enjoy the active presence of Spirit.

I do not like the man who squanders life for fame; give me the man who living makes a name.

I had talked to a lot of people in Golden State’s front offices before the draft. They said they liked me, but they had a lot of guards, so I didn’t think that I would end up there.

When you’re around me and really see that all I do is live and breathe for my work, it’s not strange, it’s just Gaga.

Happiness doesn’t depend on any external conditions, it is governed by our mental attitude.

Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.

The doer alone learneth.

Fighting for one’s freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.

I don’t ever want to be caught up in a system of thinking I can do one thing ‚cos that’s just… that’s just telling yourself a lie.

Life loves the liver of it.

Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.

The man who knows it can’t be done counts the risk, not the reward.

Don’t give in to excuses that can keep you from really living the best life God has for you.