It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‚always do what you are afraid to do.‘

I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.

In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.

I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.

All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.

I’m perpetually lonely.

The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.

Remember, man does not live on bread alone: sometimes he needs a little buttering up.

Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

To meditate means to go home to yourself. Then you know how to take care of the things that are happening inside you, and you know how to take care of the things that happen around you.

If you look at anyone who has achieved great success and wealth, people like Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, or Lance Armstrong, they have all focused intensely in order to win.

The major reason for setting a goal is for what it makes of you to accomplish it. What it makes of you will always be the far greater value than what you get.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

When I was writing ‚Kitchen Confidential,‘ I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

If you have the chance to be exposed to a loving, understanding environment where the seed of compassion, loving kindness, can be watered every day, then you become a more loving person.

The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

The more you live in the present moment, the more the fear of death disappears.

That service is the noblest which is rendered for its own sake.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.

Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun, and I think I’m sort of building up to doing something else quite soon.

Choose people who lift you up.

Your ability to use the principle of autosuggestion will depend, very largely, upon your capacity to concentrate upon a given desire until that desire becomes a burning obsession.

The thing I always say to people is this: ‚If you avoid failure, you also avoid success.‘

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

I’d be more frightened by not using whatever abilities I’d been given. I’d be more frightened by procrastination and laziness.

In past generations, people would try to play younger than they really are. My trick is, I don’t try to play younger than I really am.

If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?

If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury; but if you injure him you will always remember.

Dignify and glorify common labor. It is at the bottom of life that we must begin, not at the top.

The highest result of education is tolerance.

Whenever I counsel someone who feels called to be an evangelist, I always urge them to guard their time and not feel like they have to do everything.

I would storm the gates of Hell if Third Marine Air Wing was overhead.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

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.

The truth is, somebody is always talking about you, so you have to let it go… if it’s not a part of your God-given destiny.

I used to have a real problem with self-pity. Every time the devil would throw a pity party, I would attend.

In a gentle way, you can shake the world.

Do right. Do your best. Treat others as you want to be treated.

You’ll never find a better sparring partner than adversity.

To add value to others, one must first value others.

You gotta keep trying to find your niche and trying to fit into whatever slot that’s left for you or to make one of your own.

One of the things I did when I discovered this huge importance of being vulnerable is very happily moved away from the shame research, because that’s such a downer, and people hate that topic. It’s not that vulnerability is the upside, but it’s better than shame, I guess.

As for my own views, they’ve of course evolved over the years. This conception of ‚renouncing beliefs‘ is very odd, as if we’re in some kind of religious cult. I ‚renounce beliefs‘ practically every time I think about the topics or find out what someone else is thinking.

Never, never, never give up.

Too much self-centered attitude, you see, brings, you see, isolation. Result: loneliness, fear, anger. The extreme self-centered attitude is the source of suffering.

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.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

Whether you like it or not, you’re forced to come to the realisation that death is out there. But I don’t fear death, I’m a fatalist. I believe when it’s your time, that’s it. It’s the hand you’re dealt.

Even the securest financial plan and the finest health coverage aren’t enough to hold us steady when the challenges come… We need something more, something deeper and unshakeable, something that will see us through life’s hard times.

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

Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert.

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

I just have always felt that people don’t change, circumstances change.

The only happiness a brave person ever troubles themselves in asking about, is happiness enough to get their work done.

I think it’s my responsibility, as a person of influence… to sometimes try to do what I can.

Better to have beasts that let themselves be killed than men who run away.

Impart as much as you can of your spiritual being to those who are on the road with you, and accept as something precious what comes back to you from them.