Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

There is a fine balance between honoring the past and losing yourself in it. For example, you can acknowledge and learn from mistakes you made, and then move on and refocus on the now. It is called forgiving yourself.

Sometimes if you got a problem deep rooted in your life, it takes a little bit of time to overcome it in that area.

I focus on my own job.

To keep the business going, you gotta keep it boomin‘.

Much learning does not teach understanding.

The true artist is not proud: he unfortunately sees that art has no limits; he feels darkly how far he is from the goal, and though he may be admired by others, he is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.

Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young.

We are more thoroughly an enlightened people, with respect to our political interests, than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads, and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information.

Every three months, I’ll say, ‚Honey, I think I should learn how to cook‘.

We were poor. But my mom never accepted that. She worked hard to become a residential contractor – got her master’s with honors at the University of New Orleans. I used to go to every class with her. Her father was my paternal figure.

Courage – you develop courage by doing small things like just as if you wouldn’t want to pick up a 100-pound weight without preparing yourself.

Freedom from effort in the present merely means that there has been effort stored up in the past.

I think being able to age gracefully is a very important talent. It is too late for me.

Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.

To master a new technology, you have to play with it.

Man needs difficulties; they are necessary for health.

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.

Where knowledge ends, religion begins.

Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.

The superior man makes the difficulty to be overcome his first interest; success only comes later.

Religion is just mind control.

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

Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.

If you want to be a good writer, be the best writer in the world. That’s what I’ve done.

When I was young I didn’t care about education, just money and box office.

You have to be able to accept failure to get better.

When I was 50 years old, I actually decided to draw up a list of half a dozen things that I really hadn’t done very well, and I was going to make efforts to improve. One of them was skiing, and I really did become a very much better skier.

For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all.

Sometimes the majority just means all the fools are on the same side.

Right discipline consists, not in external compulsion, but in the habits of mind which lead spontaneously to desirable rather than undesirable activities.

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.

Language is the dress of thought.

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.

As far as a glass ceiling, I feel that all you can do is give it your absolute best with whatever gifts the universe has given you. And if you make it in some way that other people can recognize, that’s fine. But even if you don’t quote-unquote make it, you’re fine if you’ve given it your whole heart and soul.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

I can’t keep somebody from being a star, and I can’t make somebody a star, and nobody can.

Happiness doesn’t come from being rich, nor merely from being successful in your career, nor by self-indulgence. One step towards happiness is to make yourself healthy and strong while you are a boy so that you can be useful and so you can enjoy life when you are a man.

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

If everything was perfect, you would never learn and you would never grow.

Life is about growing and improving and getting better.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

People look at the same passage, and one person will say this is the best thing he’s ever read, and another person will say it’s absolutely idiotic. I mean, there’s no way to reconcile those two things. You just have to forget the whole business of what people are saying.

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

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.

I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.

Too much of what is called ‚education‘ is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

We become wiser by adversity; prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right.

I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

It creeps me out sometimes to think of the person I was. I was a terrible person. I was mean to people.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those who we cannot resemble.

No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

One of the things I definitely think of as a driver of me is fear. And it’s fear of failure, fear of being overtaken.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

Any hand that I’ve shaken, any person that I met when I was Joe Blow, now that I’m this guy Kevin Hart, has come back. That’s why I treat everybody with respect. I’m always a nice pleasant guy to meet because when they come back to you, they remember.

If you don’t feel safe as a child, you can’t learn.