Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

Personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures.

Thought is the parent of the deed.

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.

Don’t think in the morning. That’s a big mistake that people make. They wake up in the morning and they start thinking. Don’t think. Just execute the plan. The plan is the alarm clock goes off, you get up, you go work out. Get some.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.

I myself would like to become more disciplined within my work.

Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

Man’s true nature being lost, everything becomes his nature; as, his true good being lost, everything becomes his good.

When individual members of the team are highly disciplined, they can be trusted and, therefore, allowed to operate with very little oversight.

Actions are visible, though motives are secret.

My father was a swim teacher. We used to swim before school, swim after school.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

We grow older, but we do not change. We become more sophisticated, but at bottom we continue to resemble our young selves, eager to listen to the next story and the next, and the next.

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.

I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want.

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.

Juvenile crime is not naturally born in the boy, but is largely due either to the spirit of adventure that is in him, to his own stupidity, or to his lack of discipline, according to the nature of the individual.

All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.

We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.

What is human warfare but just this; an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.

It sounds simple telling people to work hard and never quit, but to really execute and demonstrate those principles takes discipline and faith. Those are the two factors that I believe separate the good from the great, the successes from the failures.

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

I make it a rule never to smoke while I’m sleeping.

Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There’s plenty of movement, but you never know if it’s going to be forward, backwards, or sideways.

Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.

There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

O‘ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

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

You must reward the kind of behavior that you want.

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.

The problem is when that fun stuff becomes the habit. And I think that’s what’s happened in our culture. Fast food has become the everyday meal.

Sacrifice, discipline and prayer are essential. We gain strength through God’s word. We receive grace from the sacrament. And when we fumble due to sin – and it’s gonna happen – confession puts us back on the field.

Winners embrace hard work. They love the discipline of it, the trade-off they’re making to win. Losers, on the other hand, see it as punishment. And that’s the difference.

For me, the way I stay consistent is through stand-up comedy.

When one travels around the world, one notices to what an extraordinary degree human nature is the same, whether in India or America, in Europe or Australia.

I read about eight newspapers in a day. When I’m in a town with only one newspaper, I read it eight times.

I’m sure that at no point in my life could I ever have shown the kind of focus and discipline and commitment necessary to work a station at elBulli or Le Bernardin. No. That ain’t me.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

The human animal cannot be trusted for anything good except en masse. The combined thought and action of the whole people of any race, creed or nationality, will always point in the right direction.

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

I’ve never been reckless – it’s always calculated. I’m mischievous, but I’m calculated.

Don’t create more enemies than you take out by some immoral act.

There are some loony people in this world!

The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.

It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

Freedom is what everyone wants – to be able to act and live with freedom. But the only way to get to a place of freedom is through discipline.