Magic has five championships. I have five championships. I’m pretty sure we both know what we’re doing.

I have a self-defense mind. I’ve had it all my life.

I always have confidence, whether I miss four in a row or make four in a row, that the next one’s going in. To a coach, sometimes that might not make sense.

People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things.

I will not be concerned at other men’s not knowing me; I will be concerned at my own want of ability.

Prosperity is the best protector of principle.

You can’t be afraid to fail. It’s the only way you succeed – you’re not gonna succeed all the time, and I know that.

If the leader is filled with high ambition and if he pursues his aims with audacity and strength of will, he will reach them in spite of all obstacles.

There’s no reason why I can’t be a mogul. When I step into a room and I’m there to have a conversation, if it pertains to business, I want to be respected as a guy who knows what he’s talking about. And that, to me, holds more weight than anything else.

I like playing for the purple and gold. This is where I want to finish up.

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

In order for me to be successful… In order to be a great artist – musician, actor, painter, whatever – you must be able to be private in public at all times. That is what we do.

I want a president with a record of public service, someone whose life’s work shows our children that we don’t chase fame and fortune for ourselves: we fight to give everyone a chance to succeed.

There are other measures of self-respect for a man, than the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.

Boldness be my friend.

Without failure there is no achievement.

In this knowledge-worker age, it’s now increasingly tied to doing well in school so you can get into better grad schools so you can get better jobs – so the pressure to do well is really high.

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

I don’t know who I touch and who I don’t. I work hard trying to make people laugh. I try to do the kind of stuff that made me laugh growing up. I don’t have any secrets. I don’t know the reasons I’ve been so well received.

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

The man who is intent on making the most of his opportunities is too busy to bother about luck.

Effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit.

Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn’t be done.

Our patience will achieve more than our force.

Sometimes people make it seem like you have to have certain prerequisites or a crazy life story in order to be successful in this world. But the truth is you really don’t.

What one has to do usually can be done.

Do your work with your whole heart, and you will succeed – there’s so little competition.

What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.

The successful men I admired all built their bodies.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

Singleness of purpose is one of the chief essentials for success in life, no matter what may be one’s aim.

When you are aspiring to the highest place, it is honorable to reach the second or even the third rank.

Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.

I have a deep, deep belief that if I tell you I’m going to crack you with a clean shot to the chin inside one minute of the first round and you will be unconscious, well, then that’s what will happen.

It’s not an experiment if you know it’s going to work.

Nothing succeeds like success. Get a little success, and then just get a little more.

I like sports, and I enjoy playing basketball and lifting weights.

Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.

I want a president with a record of public service: someone whose life’s work shows our children that we don’t chase form and fortune for ourselves; we fight to give everyone a chance to succeed.

Surface R&B doesn’t work any more. The whole heartthrob thing, songs about unrealistic love and tearing your shirt off every show – that’s not really where it’s at any more. It’s becoming harder for those guys to sell records, and harder for them to succeed.

I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.

A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.

It feels good being a restaurant owner because it’s part of my dreams of being the biggest mogul.

The principle of all successful effort is to try to do not what is absolutely the best, but what is easily within our power, and suited for our temperament and condition.

A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.

I’m crazy and I don’t pretend to be anything else.

I’m not trying to be sexy. It’s just my way of expressing myself when I move around.

Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.

Climbing to the top demands strength, whether it is to the top of Mount Everest or to the top of your career.

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions – for the fun of it – then one day you’ll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one!

There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.

In order to become prosperous, a person must initially work very hard, so he or she has to sacrifice a lot of leisure time.

Victory belongs to the most persevering.

My problem is I am Christian, so I think other people must have success, too; it’s not about me.

The love of life is necessary to the vigorous prosecution of any undertaking.

I guess I have a little bit of an ego. I’m confidently cocky, you might say.

Without discipline, there’s no life at all.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.