In a universe that’s an intelligent system with a divine creative force supporting it, there simply can be no accidents. As tough as it is to acknowledge, you had to go through what you went through in order to get to where you are today, and the evidence is that you did.

Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.

I never read one hateful thing said about me by some 12 year old. So I got to live an actual life. And I’ve kept that mentality. Just because there’s a hurricane going on around you doesn’t mean you have to open the window and look at it.

Do not be in a hurry to succeed. What would you have to live for afterwards? Better make the horizon your goal; it will always be ahead of you.

I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

High-quality early-childhood programs and health coverage have expanded, and the number of mentoring relationships for at-risk youth has risen dramatically. That progress is encouraging, but it’s not evenly distributed.

I have now exactly the same weight I had when I was 18, 20.

You can’t stop everything from happening. But we’ve gotten to a point where we’re certainly trying. If a car doesn’t have four hundred air bags in it, then it’s no good.

I have no time to think about other writers. I am too busy with my own problems.

I don’t have the best track record with quotes.

I went through a period when I felt my film characters were having more fun than I was. It might partly explain why I ended up tattooed or doing certain extreme things in my life.

Every seven years, I sit down and make a whole new plan.

Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.

My father was a mean, controlling and manipulative person for most of his life. He was unpredictable and unstable.

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.

The United States has to move very fast to even stand still.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.

No one is laughable who laughs at himself.

Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something.

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

Faith never makes a confession.

So many people live with anger and unforgiveness, and many of them are Christians.

I’ve been searching for ways to heal myself, and I’ve found that kindness is the best way.

A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.

The fact that you are willing to say, ‚I do not understand, and it is fine,‘ is the greatest understanding you could exhibit.

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.

I heard that when Christina Aguilera went back to her prom, people, like, booed her. I can’t imagine going through that. If you know that’s going to happen, why put yourself in that situation? I’d rather play for 20,000 screaming people, you know?

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

I never thought of losing, but now that it‘ s happened, the only thing is to do it right. That’s my obligation to all the people who believe in me. We all have to take defeats in life.

Remind yourself that winning an argument or proving your point really gets you nowhere in the long run. Win through your actions, not your words.

I learned that very often the most intolerant and narrow-minded people are the ones who congratulate themselves on their tolerance and open-mindedness.

I can understand how some people might resent me for having the audacity to continue playing music, but it’d take a lot more than that to stop me from doing it. I started Foo Fighters because I didn’t want to retreat.

When I was younger, I felt pressure to become someone else once I became successful.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation – and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what’s going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

We all have a tendency to avoid our weaknesses. When we do that, we never progress or get any better.

Competition is not only the basis of protection to the consumer, but is the incentive to progress.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

It’s important that we invest in America – literally. The terrorists wanted to destroy our economy, and we can’t let our system fall apart. We also have to invest in one another.

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

There’s always a bittersweet kind of thing, but I feel like everything had to work out the way it is. Everything that had to happen, happened.

I was in a terrible mess in my childhood.

Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.

We’ve come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.

Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.

Until you have cultivated the habit of saying some kind word of those whom you do not admire, you will be neither successful nor happy.

When I was a kid, I had a tendency to criticize. But when I did, my mum would whisk me off to the bathroom to stand in front of a mirror. Ten minutes, never less. To think about how criticism is a poor reflection on the one who criticizes.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.

I have bad reflexes. I was once run over by a car being pushed by two guys.

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.