The difference between us and them, between you and success, is not that you never fail, but it’s how you recover from those failures – is that you keep getting up time and time again. You figure out what you did wrong, and then you make it right. I say that to my kids every day.

Find people who will make you better.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.

An unused life is an early death.

If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress.

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

The real story of Facebook is just that we’ve worked so hard for all this time. I mean, the real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.

When we make progress quickly, it feeds our emotions. Then, when there’s a period of waiting or we hit a plateau, we find out how committed we really are and whether we’re going to see things through to the finish or quit.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

Only those who want everything done for them are bored.

Now that I’m a parent, I understand why my father was in a bad mood a lot.

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn’t standing still.

When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.

People who pity themselves think, ‚Why would I try to do anything? I’ll just fail.‘

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

One of the things I’ve told men over and over and over and over is if you’re being rejected by all the women that you approach, it’s not the women!

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

Great acts are made up of small deeds.

Sometimes if you got a problem deep rooted in your life, it takes a little bit of time to overcome it in that area.

Next to excellence is the appreciation of it.

‚9 to 5,‘ that little song, that little story, just won’t ever end. Just like ‚I Will Always Love You,‘ it just keeps comin‘ back, popping up its head in one way or another.

My whole thing is to inspire, to better people, to better myself forever in this thing that we call rap, this thing that we call hip hop.

If you want to reach the top, don’t run over others. Likely, the only way you’ll reach the top is to be carried there by others.

Never leave a rhinestone unturned.

Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.

Chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction.

Most employees only want to know how much they get paid and how much time off they get – they probably don’t have the mission in their souls.

Put your leaders in stressful scenarios. Make them figure out solutions under pressure. See if you can make them frustrated, angry, and flustered, and then demand decisive leadership from them. They will be challenged at first, but they will get better over time.

I was a little worried that young people would think the only game was being political and manipulative when really the bigger game is being so good at what you do that nobody can argue with your results.

Fame itself… doesn’t really afford you anything more than a good seat in a restaurant.

I don’t want to make money, I just want to be wonderful.

I didn’t always have 14,000 people wanting to hang out with me on a Saturday night.

I’m not resigned, but I’m realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long. And the other wager is, the part of the wager, it’s a certainty you’ll have a terrible time and you may wish you were dying because it’s an awful process.

Growth is the great separator between those who succeed and those who do not. When I see a person beginning to separate themselves from the pack, it’s almost always due to personal growth.

I don’t have the best track record with quotes.

To make an embarrassing admission, I like video games. That’s what got me into software engineering when I was a kid. I wanted to make money so I could buy a better computer to play better video games – nothing like saving the world.

A word of encouragement from a teacher to a child can change a life. A word of encouragement from a spouse can save a marriage. A word of encouragement from a leader can inspire a person to reach her potential.

I want kids. I want a soccer team, and I want a husband.

I want the troops from Great Britain and the U.S. to be successful, but by the same token, Afghanistan has always been a screw-up.

One man cannot practice many arts with success.

When I look back at what I had to go through in black baseball, I can only marvel at the many black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go.

An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.

A man’s character is his fate.

Carry the battle to them. Don’t let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive and don’t ever apologize for anything.

Man has two great spiritual needs. One is for forgiveness. The other is for goodness.

If you’re not going to be rewarded for your virtues, and instead you’re going to be punished for them, then what’s your motivation to continue?

When you are a beginning film maker you are desperate to survive. The most important thing in the end is survival and being able to get to your next picture.

There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is limitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest.

When you know what you want, and want it bad enough, you will find a way to get it.

It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.

Satan wants us to constantly focus on everything that is wrong with us and look at how far we still have to go. But God desires for us to rejoice in how far we have already come.

Get off your butt and join the Marines!

Most of us are raised to believe we are ordinary. The anchor of the universe is present in every child. A parent only needs to guide and step aside and let them fulfill their dharma. Help children remember that they can do or be anything.

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.

The noblest search is the search for excellence.

When you tell a recruiter that you’re almost 300 pounds and you want to be a SEAL, it doesn’t go too well. I got hung up on a lot.

Building a mission and building a business go hand in hand. The primary thing that excites me is the mission. But we have always had a healthy understanding that we need to do both.

The superior man makes the difficulty to be overcome his first interest; success only comes later.