Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.

I didn’t start sweating until I had children. That was one of the first things I realized when my daughter Violet was born – I started getting wicked BO. You know there’s a difference between basketball BO and stress BO? This was definitely stress BO. Like, new dad BO.

We should every night call ourselves to an account: what infirmity have I mastered today? what passions opposed? what temptation resisted? what virtue acquired? Our vices will abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.

Homework’s hard. Especially math. My kids joke with me. They tell me they have homework. I say, ‚Okay.‘ And then I sit down and they say, ‚It’s math.‘ ‚No! Not math! English, history, anything!‘

You definitely want your kids to understand their heritage, but I don’t want my kids to just focus on being black. They are people. I don’t want them to judge other people or to be judged. I want them to be good people, so good people will treat them accordingly. I preach that to my kids and everything else falls into place.

Happiness is a ball after which we run wherever it rolls, and we push it with our feet when it stops.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.

We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set.

The happiest people in the world are those who feel absolutely terrific about themselves, and this is the natural outgrowth of accepting total responsibility for every part of their life.

True happiness arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one’s self, and in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.

My first job in all honesty is going to continue to be mom-in-chief. Making sure that in this transition, which will be even more of a transition for the girls… that they are settled and that they know they will continue to be the center of our universe.

What’s real freedom? Real freedom is being able to not have my way and still be just as happy as if I did.

Nevertheless, whether in occurrences lasting days, hours or mere minutes at a time, I have experienced happiness often, and have had brief encounters with it in my later years, even in old age.

If something inconveniences my children too much or takes me away from them, I won’t do it.

Kids are watching us. I experience it every single day. They hang on my every word, what I wear, what I say.

I like the city. I like the concrete. I like big business. I like being a CEO of my own company and having a lot of responsibilities. At the same time, when I can go off with a backpack or off on a surfboard or even off on a run somewhere in the woods – that’s where I’m really happy.

To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one’s family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one’s own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.

I only want my work to make people happy.

If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.

We believed in our idea – a family park where parents and children could have fun- together.

I would like to fly in space. Absolutely. That would be cool. I used to just do personally risky things, but now I’ve got kids and responsibilities, so I can’t be my own test pilot. That wouldn’t be a good idea. But I definitely want to fly as soon as it’s a sensible thing to do.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.

Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.

I have a full and satisfying life. My work and my family are very important to me.

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy.

In the studio, we adhere to a strict colour code. Developed over decades, the colour code consists of a finite and precise colour palate… The whole world as we experience it comes to us through the mystic realm of colour.

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

According to Ethiopian custom, parents wait to name a baby because children often die in the first weeks of life.

Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it.

Happiness depends upon ourselves.

The object of the superior man is truth.

When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It’s inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

If you want someone to say, ‚She’s so sweet, and she’s so cute, and, honey, point your foot,‘ that’s not my school. You can go to the YMCA and have a nobody teach your kid if that’s what you want to hear.

Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.

I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.

Experience teaches us that it is much easier to prevent an enemy from posting themselves than it is to dislodge them after they have got possession.

I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.

Treat those who are good with goodness, and also treat those who are not good with goodness. Thus goodness is attained. Be honest to those who are honest, and be also honest to those who are not honest. Thus honesty is attained.

It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature’s gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.

The kids never listen to you, especially the youngest ones.

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.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone – a memory.

I’d like to think that I’m a calm and sweet person. I tend to be very playful at home with my children, but in life… we have to fight our battles – our work battles, our political battles, our personal battles – and we’re focused.

I mean, if you didn’t get it or if you didn’t feel like you enjoyed it, sometimes that experience can change.

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.

The best workers, like the happiest livers, look upon their work as a kind of game: the harder they play the more enjoyable it becomes.