People who truly understand what is meant by self-reliance know they must live their lives by ethics rather than rules.

Be happy with being you. Love your flaws. Own your quirks. And know that you are just as perfect as anyone else, exactly as you are.

To be is to do.

Don’t make me into this airy-fairy, moralist, idealist because I’m not.

It is right to give every man his due.

A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body – the wishbone.

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.

The way is long if one follows precepts, but short… if one follows patterns.

If we’re really honest with ourselves, most of us will admit that we want to impress people, and this is what’s causing us to do what we do.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‚I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.‘

The thing I always say to people is this: ‚If you avoid failure, you also avoid success.‘

It’s hard to practice compassion when we’re struggling with our authenticity or when our own worthiness is off-balance.

A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.

I had never been in charge of anything. I’d always worked for someone. I worked for a furniture warehouse. I did masonry. I always had a boss yelling at me. So I’d never been in charge of an organization.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

Although I’m only fourteen, I know quite well what I want. I know who is right and who is wrong. I have my opinions, my own ideas and principles, and although it may sound pretty mad from an adolescent, I feel more of a person than a child. I feel quite independent of anyone.

If it’s going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

Don’t be dependent. At all. Ever. Period.

States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions.

To add value to others, one must first value others.

While children are struggling to be unique, the world around them is trying all means to make them look like everybody else.

The highest result of education is tolerance.

The things that transfixed you as a child, that you found most exciting was not a passing fancy, but a message about what you’re supposed to do.

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

I have great respect for the past. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going. I have respect for the past, but I’m a person of the moment. I’m here, and I do my best to be completely centered at the place I’m at, then I go forward to the next place.

I want to put a ding in the universe.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

To be safe at the expense of the liberty of other people is a difficult equation.

I don’t have all the answers.

To deal with individual human needs at the everyday level can be noble sometimes.

I think it is the height of ignorance to believe that the sexual act is an independent function necessary like sleeping or eating. Seeing, therefore, that I did not desire more children, I began to strive after self-control. There was endless difficulty in the task.

Action may not bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.

There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who’ll decide where to go.

I got teased my entire school life. What they were picking on I don’t even understand.

My philosophy is: It’s none of my business what people say of me and think of me.

Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.

Growing old has been the greatest surprise of my life.

Sin cannot be conceived in a natural state, but only in a civil state, where it is decreed by common consent what is good or bad.

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it was very, very strong in the forest.

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

When I grow up, I want to be like Balvin.

Learning about climate change triggered my depression in the first place. But it was also what got me out of my depression, because there were things I could do to improve the situation. I don’t have time to be depressed anymore.

Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.

The faults of a superior person are like the sun and moon. They have their faults, and everyone sees them; they change and everyone looks up to them.

You have to just make the choices you make in life. I made the choices I made because I believed they were right for me.

I believe that having a spiritual life is so important in everybody’s life.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

I am an ordinary man who worked hard to develop the talent I was given. I believed in myself, and I believe in the goodness of others.

I used to pray that God would make me a great athlete, and He never did.

I don’t think any country is perfect. It’s our responsibility to do the best we can do to change the things we don’t like. I think that’s part of social responsibility, and everybody is going to do that in their own way.

You must live for another if you wish to live for yourself.

Instead of blaming everyone and everything else for your problems, pray for God to help you take an inventory of what’s been on your mind so you can think about what you’ve been thinking about.

What comes out when life squeezes you? When someone hurts or offends you? If anger, pain and fear come out of you, it’s because that’s what’s inside.