Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.

Partnering with Atlantic Records creates the opportunity to take what we’re doing to the next level, without compromising.

A BMW can’t take you as far as a diploma.

Saints can be happy under every circumstance.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

We need to internalize this idea of excellence. Not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent.

Each day brings opportunity for decisions for eternity.

A great mind becomes a great fortune.

I had noticed that many of these successful people, historical and contemporary, shared certain common traits. They had a way of thinking that was exceptionally fluid; they could adapt to almost any circumstance; when confronted with problems, they could look at them from novel perspectives and solve them.

Love is the answer to everything. It’s the only reason to do anything. If you don’t write stories you love, you’ll never make it. If you don’t write stories that other people love, you’ll never make it.

By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property.

Everybody asks if putting is like shooting free throws. It has a very similar kind of mindset. And it’s just you, the ball, and the target.

Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.

I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.

It takes no more time to see the good side of life than it takes to see the bad.

You can’t knock on opportunity’s door and not be ready.

Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.

My own dreams fortunately came true in this great state. I became Mr. Universe; I became a successful businessman. And even though some people say I still speak with a slight accent, I have reached the top of the acting profession.

Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment, full effort is full victory.

For me, education has never been simply a policy issue – it’s personal. Neither of my parents and hardly anyone in the neighborhood where I grew up went to college. But thanks to a lot of hard work and plenty of financial aid, I had the opportunity to attend some of the finest universities in this country.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.

I wasn’t sure of the exact mindset you should have when you go into a Test match. So I probably became too defensive when I played my first Test match. Short balls in one-day cricket, I have never thought of just defending.

If what you did yesterday seems big, you haven’t done anything today.

Courage is the greatest of all virtues, because if you haven’t courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others.

Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become.

People tend to dwell more on negative things than on good things. So the mind then becomes obsessed with negative things, with judgments, guilt and anxiety produced by thoughts about the future and so on.

My father will anticipate everything. He will leave you and me no chance to do a great and brilliant deed.

If a man can… make a better mousetrap, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

Aim for the sky and you’ll reach the ceiling. Aim for the ceiling and you’ll stay on the floor.

The great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.

Better a little which is well done, than a great deal imperfectly.

Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.

I say luck is when an opportunity comes along and you’re prepared for it.

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

Success is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

I am still far from being what I want to be, but with God’s help I shall succeed.

The mind is everything. What you think you become.

You have to dream before your dreams can come true.

Even as you make progress, you need the discipline to keep from backtracking and sabotaging the success as it’s happening.

I treated it like every day was my last day with a basketball.

We should never lose an occasion. Opportunity is more powerful even than conquerors and prophets.

Let man live at a distance from God, and the universe remains neutral or hostile to him. But let man believe in God, and immediately all around him the elements, even the irksome, of the inevitable organize themselves into a friendly whole, ordered to the ultimate success of life.

With ideas it is like with dizzy heights you climb: At first they cause you discomfort and you are anxious to get down, distrustful of your own powers; but soon the remoteness of the turmoil of life and the inspiring influence of the altitude calm your blood; your step gets firm and sure and you begin to look – for dizzier heights.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.

Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.

The closest I ever came to getting married was just before I started singing. In fact, my first record saved my neck.

Imaginary evils soon become real one by indulging our reflections on them.

I’m intimidated by the fear of being average.

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

When you have box-office results, Hollywood treats you different. Hollywood stands up. Once you get to the point where Hollywood sees that you create results, then the demand for you becomes higher.

There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.

We can feel joy even while having a bad day, a bad week, or even a bad year!

It doesn’t matter where you are coming from. All that matters is where you are going.