Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don’t let yourself believe it will happen to you.

Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.

What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you’re hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

Without health life is not life; it is only a state of langour and suffering – an image of death.

For me, there are two types of people: the young and the experienced.

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over… is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they’re going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

The secret is not to give up hope. It’s very hard not to because if you’re really doing something worthwhile I think you will be pushed to the brink of hopelessness before you come through the other side.

I don’t argue when people say that my message is simple, but I believe Jesus‘ message was simple.

I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.

Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

For time is the longest distance between two places.

Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

I’m a Christian by choice.

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

It’s lack that gives us inspiration. It’s not fullness.

Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.

Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength.

Go up in an airplane. Go high enough, and it’s like we don’t even exist.

There are times when you throw an interception and you’re beating yourself up.

I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America’s really large shadow and that’s not all that bad.

One should take good care not to grow too wise for so great a pleasure of life as laughter.

If it’s stress of things that we cannot control, what you have to do is you mitigate that stress as much as possible. You’ve planned, you’ve trained, you’ve done everything you can in your power to mitigate the stress that’s facing you. And then after that, there’s nothing you can do. So, you have to let that one go.

Change alone is unchanging.

I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

We should all start to live before we get too old.

Money doesn’t make you happy. I now have $50 million but I was just as happy when I had $48 million.

I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.

I have learned, in my life and work as a sportswriter, that big-time Sports and big-time Politics are not so far apart in America. They are both a means to the same end, which is victory… And why not? Victory is good for you, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

They say miracles are past.

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.

This life, which had been the tomb of his virtue and of his honour, is but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

We have a choice about how we take what happens to us in our life and whether or not we allow it to turn us. We can become consumed by hate and darkness, or we’re able to regain our humanity somehow, or come to terms with things and learn something about ourselves.

You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.

Great tragedy has come to us, and we are meeting it with the best that is in our country, with courage and concern for others because this is America. This is who we are.

Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

Fame and power are the objects of all men. Even their partial fruition is gained by very few; and that, too, at the expense of social pleasure, health, conscience, life.

I believe the most solemn duty of the American president is to protect the American people. If America shows uncertainty and weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy. This will not happen on my watch.

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 have nowhere claimed nor even implied that unbelief is a guarantee of good conduct or even an indicator of it.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.

My religion encompasses all religions. I believe in God, I believe in the universe. I believe you are god, I believe I am god; I believe the earth is god and the universe is god. We’re all god.