If you’re not ready for everything, you’re not ready for anything.

I resigned from the Marine Corps and flying in 1974, even though I loved them both. I quit because I no longer wanted to fight for peace. Instead, I believe we can build a more sustainable peace by working for prosperity.

I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion.

My parents were dealing with evictions and repossessions and electricity getting shut off, and I just realized that I had to get it together.

My message, especially to young people is to have courage to think differently, courage to invent, to travel the unexplored path, courage to discover the impossible and to conquer the problems and succeed. These are great qualities that they must work towards. This is my message to the young people.

Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one’s potential.

Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.

I have only one counsel for you – be master.

You have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

No crime is so great as daring to excel.

I’ve been careful in love. I’ve been careless in love. And I’ve had adventures I wouldn’t trade for anything.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

Failed plans should not be interpreted as a failed vision. Visions don’t change, they are only refined. Plans rarely stay the same, and are scrapped or adjusted as needed. Be stubborn about the vision, but flexible with your plan.

Above anything else, I hate to lose.

You just do what you can and you have as much fun as possible.

I am an over-achiever, and I want to be known for the good things in my life.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.

It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.

Sometimes, I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there’s always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?

Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people – more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true – in certain rare, isolated cases.

You must take the compromise to win, or else nothing. That means: you race or you do not.

Opportunity dances with those already on the dance floor.

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

As a kid from Compton, you can get all the success in the world and still question your worth.

I’m afraid to fail again.

I learned a long time ago how to be coachable.

Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals.

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.

If a guy hits .300 every year, what does he have to look forward to? I always tried to stay around .190, with three or four RBI. And I tried to get them all in September. That way I always had something to talk about during the winter.

The essential lesson I’ve learned in life is to just be yourself. Treasure the magnificent being that you are and recognize first and foremost you’re not here as a human being only. You’re a spiritual being having a human experience.

Whether you come from a council estate or a country estate, your success will be determined by your own confidence and fortitude.

To me, a leader is someone who holds her- or himself accountable for finding potential in people and processes. And so what I think is really important is sustainability.

My music seems to have a bigger mission than I have, which is very soothing but also very strange because people see more in me than I see, which can be terrifying.

I even found it difficult to watch myself playing on TV because I couldn’t identify with the person on the screen. I couldn’t get to grips with it. It was as if it was all happening to someone else.

An individual step in character training is to put responsibility on the individual.

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

Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

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.

Thanksgiving dinners take eighteen hours to prepare. They are consumed in twelve minutes. Half-times take twelve minutes. This is not coincidence.

My drive is other people’s success.

Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.

Loving others always costs us something and requires effort. And you have to decide to do it on purpose. You can’t wait for a feeling to motivate you.

The thing that motivates me is a very common form of motivation. And that is, with other folks counting on me, it’s so easy to be motivated.

He that can have patience can have what he will.

I don’t tell people, ‚You’re okay the way that you are.‘ That’s not the right story. The right story is, ‚You’re way less than you could be.‘

The thermometer of success is merely the jealousy of the malcontents.

I won’t accept anything less than the best a player’s capable of doing… and he has the right to expect the best that I can do for him and the team!

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

We should not moor a ship with one anchor, or our life with one hope.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

I had my moments of being humiliated, and then I had moments of doing something humiliating. I’m glad I lived out both roles.

To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.

I’m only as good as my last word, my last hook, my last bridge.

Success has always been a great liar.

The final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.

Only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.

Mastery passes often for egotism.