It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done, compared to what he might have done.

To me, if you’re trying to impress a girl, get a date, they’re gonna like that more because you’re a confident guy. That’s what it comes down to.

There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.

Whatever has happened in my quest for innovation has been part of my quest for immaculate reality.

I’m constantly thinking.

The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depends upon himself, and not upon other men, has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation, the man of manly character and of wisdom.

In every parting there is an image of death.

Success is steady progress toward one’s personal goals.

I had never been in charge of anything. I’d always worked for someone. I worked for a furniture warehouse. I did masonry. I always had a boss yelling at me. So I’d never been in charge of an organization.

Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.

I always was that person who was hard on myself and challenged myself no matter what I was doing, whether it was passing third grade or playing basketball.

Once you start doing only what you’ve already proven you can do, you’re on the road to death.

Ambition has become a dirty word, and I believe it is a great evolutionary force for the positive. If people fail or go astray in their ambition I can live with it but not with people lowering their expectations, wasting time, slacking off and glorifying failure and stupidity.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‚What are you doing for others?‘

It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.

Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.

It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.

Your life is like a play with several acts. Some of the characters who enter have short roles to play, others, much larger. Some are villains and others are good guys. But all of them are necessary; otherwise, they wouldn’t be in the play. Embrace them all, and move on to the next act.

Some people can just let things go, but I can’t, especially if there’s something that worries me or makes me sad.

The two worst strategic mistakes to make are acting prematurely and letting an opportunity slip; to avoid this, the warrior treats each situation as if it were unique and never resorts to formulae, recipes or other people’s opinions.

Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.

Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.

It is a pleasant thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

Even when you’re 50, you can make the effort to improve your standards.

Give whatever you are doing and whoever you are with the gift of your attention.

We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.

No poet or orator has ever existed who believed there was any better than himself.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

I’m not a person that socializes very well.

If I’d had good discipline, I might have gone into music.

It’s so easy to settle for less than God’s best for us because we don’t always feel like taking responsibility for our behavior or putting forth some effort to do what we need to do so we can accomplish great things for God and help people. But the cost of settling for less is actually harder than being completely obedient to God’s will.

A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and ‚superlive,‘ as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so.

Remembering what you’ve been through and how that has strengthened your mindset can lift you out of a negative brain loop and help you bypass those weak, one-second impulses to give in. Even if you’re feeling low and beat down by life right now, I guarantee you can think of a time or two when you overcame odds and tasted success.

My experience has been that work is almost the best way to pull oneself out of the depths.

The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one’s self.

The only cure for contempt is counter-contempt.

If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.

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

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Don’t ever criticize yourself. Don’t go around all day long thinking, ‚I’m unattractive, I’m slow, I’m not as smart as my brother.‘ God wasn’t having a bad day when he made you… If you don’t love yourself in the right way, you can’t love your neighbour. You can’t be as good as you are supposed to be.

When I’m a director, I look at myself the actor as a completely different person. It’s somebody else up there, an actor playing a role. I keep myself out of it.

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

I have a memory, and I can just eliminate mistakes when they come up because I’ve already made them.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.

My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I’m so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don’t have the guts to take their names out of the book.

I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

I fear that many a man’s good resolutions only need the ordinary fire of daily life to make them melt away. So, too, with fine professions and the boastings of perfection which abound in this age of shams.

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us.

You cannot push any one up a ladder unless he be willing to climb a little himself.

I think I’ve got wiser.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider.