The man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he is justly entitled.

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.

My fans saw me get engaged, saw me make that woman my wife, me having kids, me divorcing, me talking about divorce before the divorce, me talking about my kids‘ reaction to that divorce.

A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

I’m a big believer in doing things that make you uncomfortable. So, we live in a world where we want to be as comfortable as we can. And we wonder why we have no growth. We wonder why – when the smallest thing in our life gets difficult – we wonder why we cower and we run away.

Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

Take care of all your memories. For you cannot relive them.

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.

I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‚Oh my God, what a blessing.‘ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.

Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

Back in the day, what motivated me was overcoming myself. Now I believe in being a leader. I’ve done it all – I’m good. Now, it’s about setting an example for others to follow. I can’t just talk it – I have to live it.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

Libraries raised me.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

How do I confront aging? With a wonder and a terror. Yeah, I’ll say that. Wonder and terror.

I’m not afraid to look like an idiot.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

When you stop caring what people think, you lose your capacity for connection. When you’re defined by it, you lose our capacity for vulnerability.

I know I will never be happy, but I know I can be gay!

We will be more successful in all our endeavors if we can let go of the habit of running all the time, and take little pauses to relax and re-center ourselves. And we’ll also have a lot more joy in living.

If you truly get in touch with a piece of carrot, you get in touch with the soil, the rain, the sunshine. You get in touch with Mother Earth and eating in such a way, you feel in touch with true life, your roots, and that is meditation. If we chew every morsel of our food in that way we become grateful and when you are grateful, you are happy.

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

I knew ‚Crenshaw‘ had elevated me and distinguished me.

Anger is like a storm rising up from the bottom of your consciousness. When you feel it coming, turn your focus to your breath.

I’m totally myself.

Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.

We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.

Life is not accumulation, it is about contribution.

Self-actualized people are independent of the good opinion of others.

The person who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore.

I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

I think it’s a very good thing to leave your country and look at it from afar.

The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love. Whomever I love and am with most of the time, or whomever I remember most vividly. I think that’s true of everyone, don’t you?

I don’t want to just revolve. I want to evolve. As a man, as a human, as a father, as a lover.

It’s true my father abused me and didn’t love and protect me the way he should have, and at times it seemed no one would ever help me and it would never end. But God always had a plan for my life, and He has redeemed me.

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.

True happiness is… to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future.

We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.

The only thing you ever have is now.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

You have to like the present; if not your life becomes secondhand, if you think it was better before. Or that it will be better in the future.

Every great person is always being helped by everybody; for their gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.

Things do not change; we change.

Always have something beautiful in sight, even if it’s just a daisy in a jelly glass.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life.

When I left the University of Notre Dame, I honestly felt I would never coach again.

Hair is about when you’re younger. I am my hair.

I have met 18 million youth, and each wants to be unique.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

Everything you need you already have. You are complete right now, you are a whole, total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else. Your completeness must be understood by you and experienced in your thoughts as your own personal reality.

Power is given only to those who dare to lower themselves and pick it up. Only one thing matters, one thing; to be able to dare!

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.