People want to tear me down, they were going to knife me anyway.

When one door is closed, don’t you know, another is open.

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

I will seize fate by the throat; it shall certainly never wholly overcome me.

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

I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.

Intelligent people should learn from their experiences. With people on the street, the bad experience has beaten them.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.

You have to come to your closed doors before you get to your open doors… What if you knew you had to go through 32 closed doors before you got to your open door? Well, then you’d come to closed door number eight and you’d think, ‚Great, I got another one out of the way’… Keep moving forward.

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.

It’s a lose-lose situation to get in a confrontation on the street. If you can break contact and get away, break contact and get away. That’s what you should learn self-defense for.

You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.

One time, this guy was bothering my mother, and me and my brothers had a stern talking with the guy and a little bit of physicality with him. So he disappeared. But I’m not a magician.

I was willing to accept what I couldn’t change.

One of the wonderful things about Oprah: She teaches you to keep on stepping.

When something an affliction happens to you, you either let it defeat you, or you defeat it.

We have the tendency to run away from suffering and to look for happiness. But, in fact, if you have not suffered, you have no chance to experience real happiness.

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.

There’s nothing I have to hide or defend. I’m gonna live my life. And there are times when people wanna try to attack me, and I don’t know why, but they will. And that’s okay.

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

Imagine your family finally making it from nothing to something, and finally getting things going, and finally buying a beautiful house and taking care of your children – and the next day, it’s completely all gone. Zero. Boom. Flat broke. So that’s when I had to man up.

Even when folks are hitting you over the head, you can’t stop marching. Even when they’re turning the hoses on you, you can’t stop.

If patience is worth anything, it must endure to the end of time. And a living faith will last in the midst of the blackest storm.

You’re not a product of your nature. That is your genetic makeup or your nurture, the things that have happened to you. Of course those things affect you powerfully, but they do not determine you.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

Americans never quit.

I’m sure like everyone else I’m not always the happiest if I don’t do a good job in quali or the race or whatever, so I think beating myself up sometimes makes me work harder.

WIth football you can have up to 28 guys you consider starters, and if they can pick up the slack when some aren’t playing so well, you don’t have to turn those two game losing streaks into six-game losing streaks.

In other words, don’t expect to always be great. Disappointments, failures and setbacks are a normal part of the lifecycle of a unit or a company and what the leader has to do is constantly be up and say ‚we have a problem, let’s go and get it‘.

The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent.

Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.

When times are bad is when the real entrepreneurs emerge.

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

We should learn to accept that change is truly the only thing that’s going on always, and learn to ride with it and enjoy it.

Even if you have a terminal disease, you don’t have to sit down and mope. Enjoy life and challenge the illness that you have.

Whenever you give up something, you must replace it with something.

This is a ruthless world and one must be ruthless to cope with it.

I don’t suffer of anything that I’ve lost.

One thing Britons have always been celebrated for, and that is being able to stick it out in a tight place.

The only way you gain mental toughness is to do things you’re not happy doing. If you continue doing things that you’re satisfied and make you happy, you’re not getting stronger. You’re staying where you’re at. Either you’re getting better, or you’re getting worse. You’re not staying the same.

The goal of jiu-jitsu in self-defense isn’t to take someone down to the ground – the goal in jiu-jitsu for self-defense is actually to be able to defend yourself on the ground, get up, and get away from an attacker. That’s what the goal is.

I’ve been through natural disasters. I lived down in Miami and was down there for Hurricane Andrew which was a Category 5. There were members of my family that thought they were going to die. Everyone was in the bathtub.

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.

I like criticism. It makes you strong.

What’s coming will come and we’ll just have to meet it when it does.

Over the years I’ve seen people lose a spouse and then withdraw and lose interest in life, and I believe we need to resist that.

I came up from a difficult background.

If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.

In fact, my courage and my bravery at a young age was the thing I was bullied for, a kind of ‚Who do you think you are?‘

We will all fail in life, but nobody has to be a failure. Failing at a thing doesn’t make you a failure. You are only a failure when you quit trying.

I worked my way up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.

Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.

We’re always looking over our shoulders, ‚what they will think, what the press will think, what will this one – am I making the right career move?‘ When you’re young you have to do all that to survive, I suppose.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

When defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans, and set sail once more toward your coveted goal.

Brave men rejoice in adversity, just as brave soldiers triumph in war.

One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them.

I am sometimes sad when I hear the personal stories of Tibetan refugees who have been tortured or beaten. Some irritation, some anger comes. But it never lasts long. I always try to think at a deeper level, to find ways to console.

Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.