The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine! When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead!

If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly and lone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors.

Nature is not human hearted.

With compassion you can die for other people, like the mother who can die for her child. You have the courage to say it because you are not afraid of losing anything, because you know that understanding and love is the foundation of happiness. But if you have fear of losing your status, your position, you will not have the courage to do it.

I definitely connected to the fact that life gets out of control and you end up doing things and wishing you were doing other things instead.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

Men walk this tightrope where any sign of weakness illicits shame, and so they’re afraid to make themselves vulnerable for fear of looking weak.

A man can’t be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

I’m a bold Christian, not a scaredy-cat Christian.

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

As long as you live, keep learning how to live.

Remember, no one decides who they’re going to vote for based on the vice president. I mean that literally.

Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world.

Nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity.

Logically, harmony must come from the heart… Harmony very much based on trust. As soon as use force, creates fear. Fear and trust cannot go together.

One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

High office teaches decision making, not substance. It consumes intellectual capital; it does not create it. Most high officials leave office with the perceptions and insights with which they entered; they learn how to make decisions but not what decisions to make.

Some minds remain open long enough for the truth not only to enter but to pass on through by way of a ready exit without pausing anywhere along the route.

The greatest mistake we make is living in constant fear that we will make one.

When befriended, remember it; when you befriend, forget it.

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

We’re not like robots. God promises to guide us through the Holy Spirit, but He gives us the freedom to make our own decisions.

Education is the best provision for old age.

The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.

It’s easier to aim to please and say what others want to hear than to form an opinion and fight for it, even if it means taking a risk or losing your job.

Fear is real, but so is love.

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can’t really understand why it doesn’t obsess everyone – I think it does really, I’m just a little more out about it.

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

Don’t throw stones at your neighbors if your own windows are glass.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.

Before you start some work, always ask yourself three questions – Why am I doing it, What the results might be and Will I be successful. Only when you think deeply and find satisfactory answers to these questions, go ahead.

A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

If I’d had good discipline, I might have gone into music.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

It seems the older you get, the more life comes into focus.

Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

It is the sign of a great mind to dislike greatness, and to prefer things in measure to things in excess.

A wise ruler ought never to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interests.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

Change alone is unchanging.

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

People have discovered that they can fool the devil; but they can’t fool the neighbors.

Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.

We will burn that bridge when we come to it.

Let’s just be smart this time. I’m looking for smart.

We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men… We are who we are because they were who they were. It’s wise to know where you come from, who called your name.

I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing.

Wisdom is found only in truth.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Guilt is just as powerful, but its influence is positive, while shame’s is destructive. Shame erodes our courage and fuels disengagement.

Men shrink less from offending one who inspires love than one who inspires fear.

If some years were added to my life, I would give fifty to the study of the Yi, and then I might come to be without great faults.

Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.

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.