There are people in the world who have skills and strength and talent that I will never have. Never. These notions that you can ‚be whatever you want to be as long as you want it bad enough‘ are not true. They are fairy tales.

The only way to get love is to be lovable. It’s very irritating if you have a lot of money. You’d like to think you could write a check: ‚I’ll buy a million dollars‘ worth of love.‘ But it doesn’t work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.

Simply put, you believe that things or people make you unhappy, but this is not accurate. You make yourself unhappy.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

Adventuring can be for the ordinary person with ordinary qualities, such as I regard myself.

We must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed toward attaining it.

The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.

The thing I always say to people is this: ‚If you avoid failure, you also avoid success.‘

I don’t follow all the 48 laws. Like, I’ve never crushed anyone totally.

Whatever one of us blames in another, each one will find in his own heart.

It’s like a muscle – if you stop going to the gym or stop running, you get weak. The military teaches you these great values, but we don’t keep up the discipline on our own, and we lose it. So wherever you go, keep that discipline up.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.

I don’t write so much now. I’m getting on 33, pot belly and creeping dementia.

We want an Afghanistan that is shaped by the dreams of the great Afghan people, not by irrational fears and overreaching ambitions of others.

You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.

I don’t think I’m bad for people. If I did think I was bad for people, I would go back to driving a truck, and I really mean this.

Everybody has goals, aspirations or whatever, and everybody has been at a point in their life where nobody believed in them.

Questioning my spiritual life has always been germane to what I was writing. Always. It’s because I’m not quite an atheist and it worries me. There’s that little bit that holds on: ‚Well, I’m almost an atheist. Give me a couple of months.‘

Man’s greatness lies in his power of thought.

Climbing to the top demands strength, whether it is to the top of Mount Everest or to the top of your career.

You cannot let where you are today cause you to get stuck. I’m going to be my best right now. That’s what faith is all about.

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

It’s normal for human beings to identify with their own separate self. The problem is that we get caught in that notion of ourself as a separate individual and caught in that individual self’s agenda.

Many receive advice, only the wise profit from it.

If a great opportunity opens itself up, I would love to be involved… or star in a movie.

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.

I didn’t know how to deal with success. If there was a Rock Star 101, I would have liked to take it. It might have helped me.

Will power is to the mind like a strong blind man who carries on his shoulders a lame man who can see.

Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

I want parents to teach that academic intelligence is essential, but so is financial intelligence.

Whenever you do a thing, act as if all the world were watching.

We are in a wrong state of mind if we are not in a thankful state of mind.

I was never particularly fond of my voice.

We are always getting ready to live but never living.

The men I idolized built their bodies and became somebody – like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger – and I thought, ‚That can be me.‘ So I started working out. The funny thing is I didn’t realize back then that I was having a defining moment.

It’s not an easy course. It’s not designed to be. We’re not here to get you in touch with your inner child.

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

I think, when you are growing up, you have to pull apart from what your mother wants or needs. You’ve got to go your own way, and that’s what I did.

Let go of offence. Let go of fear. Let go of revenge. Don’t live angry, let go now!

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

When you revolutionize education, you’re taking the very mechanism of how people be smarter and do new things, and you’re priming the pump for so many incredible things.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.

I understand aggressiveness in only one way: being prepared to hurt yourself, not someone else.

My mother fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.

I never fall in love.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

I try to be the same person I was yesterday.

The work is the work. The work is not me.

If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.

To do your best is no longer good enough. We now have to do the seemingly impossible.

I’m still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.

I like to recede away from classifications. You might say that indicates a fundamental lack of commitment. I suppose that’s true to some degree.

I approach love differently now that I know it’s hard for it to work out.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

I always believe that there should come a time when your energy, speed, stamina should combine well with your brains.

The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.

Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.