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

You should never give up your inner self.

Freedom is what everyone wants – to be able to act and live with freedom. But the only way to get to a place of freedom is through discipline.

Pretension is a poor joke that you play on yourself. Snap out of it. Recognise your strengths, work on your weaknesses. Real achievement is liking what you see in the mirror every morning.

Truth cannot be brought down; rather, the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountaintop to the valley. If you would attain to the mountaintop, you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.

If a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, sir, should keep his friendship in a constant repair.

The pursuit, even of the best things, ought to be calm and tranquil.

No man was ever great by imitation.

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else.

I set records that will never be equaled. In fact, I hope 90% of them don’t even get printed.

Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed… It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.

Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit.

When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do well, that’s Memoirs.

You cannot let where you are today cause you to get stuck. I’m going to be my best right now. That’s what faith is all about.

Wow, I get to wake up again? Ok. You have to make good with what you’ve got.

Men may change their climate, but they cannot change their nature. A man that goes out a fool cannot ride or sail himself into common sense.

The only way to get love is to be lovable. It’s very irritating if you have a lot of money. You’d like to think you could write a check: ‚I’ll buy a million dollars‘ worth of love.‘ But it doesn’t work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.

I’m like a recovering perfectionist. For me it’s one day at a time.

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do.

I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

I’m not afraid to make mistakes.

Good intentions never change anything. They only become a deeper and deeper rut.

True wealth is not of the pocket, but of the heart and of the mind.

I’m one of the world’s most self-conscious people. I really have to struggle.

Everybody has a purpose.

The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosopher’s or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself, and that is why you must know yourself – Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self.

Without being the most confident person in the world, I think I am the right person for Liverpool.

We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences, and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves: nothing original, pristine, clear.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

How should a man be capable of grooming his own horse, or of furbishing his own spear and helmet, if he allows himself to become unaccustomed to tending even his own person, which is his most treasured belonging?

A child wants things to be a certain way. When you get to be an adult, you just understand that some people are good, some are not, and you can’t be naive.

You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

I was never really good at anything except for the ability to learn.

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

Life can be boring unless you put some effort into it.

I love money because I’ve earned it. I won sixty G’s with my first knockout – and the week before, I was collecting social welfare.

Artists have a responsibility to speak and to act when governments fail, and if we don’t do that, we really deserve the world we get.

You can live your life angry, bitter, mad at somebody or even guilty, not letting go of your own mistakes, but you won’t receive the good things God has in store.

If you’ve got a talent, protect it.

When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.

You simply have to accept that your demons are a part of you.

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say, for one, that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to be developed.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it.

We will be more successful in all our endeavors if we can let go of the habit of running all the time, and take little pauses to relax and re-center ourselves. And we’ll also have a lot more joy in living.

When I get down, I don’t waller around for long.

The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers.

I don’t think there’s anyone who would say they don’t want or need more of God’s power in their life.

Those who commit injustice bear the greatest burden.

You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for.

I love California, I practically grew up in Phoenix.

Humble people ask for help.

I’ll never, ever be full. I’ll always be hungry. Obviously, I’m not talking about food. Growing up, I had nothing for such a long time. Someone told me a long time ago, and I’ve never forgotten it, ‚Once you’ve ever been hungry, really, really hungry, then you’ll never, ever be full.‘

Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?

I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.

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.

It doesn’t matter which side of the fence you get off on sometimes. What matters most is getting off. You cannot make progress without making decisions.