Thought is the parent of the deed.

If a subject excites us, if it stirs our deepest curiosity, or if we have to learn because the stakes are high, we pay much more attention. What we absorb sinks in.

The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of tiny pushes of each honest worker.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

If everything isn’t black and white, I say, ‚Why the hell not?‘

Nothing is stopping me from doing what I love to do.

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.

I think that at the start of a game, you’re always playing to win, and then maybe if you’re ahead late in the game, you start playing not to lose. The true competitors, though, are the ones who always play to win.

God hangs the greatest weights upon the smallest wires.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.

Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.

No matter how hard we might wish, we will not be able to transform China’s behavior overnight.

Fighting for one’s freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

Whatever you want to do, if you want to be great at it, you have to love it and be able to make sacrifices for it.

So never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.

I’d rather give my life than be afraid to give it.

I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.

Without football, my life is worth nothing.

Even the best teams can fail. Celebrities can fade. There is only One in whom your faith is always safe, and that is in the Lord Jesus Christ. And you need to let your faith show!

The purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced – the just demands of peace and security will be met – or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.

If you ask people what they’ve always wanted to do, most people haven’t done it. That breaks my heart.

Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

If you study the writings of the mystics, you will always find things in them that appear to be paradoxes, as in Zen, particularly.

The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.

And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul.

Change alone is unchanging.

Opportunity makes a thief.

Ideas excite me, and as soon as I get excited, the adrenaline gets going and the next thing I know I’m borrowing energy from the ideas themselves.

If a man constantly aspires is he not elevated?

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

I think that a man should not live beyond the age when he begins to deteriorate, when the flame that lighted the brightest moment of his life has weakened.

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.

Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

You are never too young to learn, never too old to change.

Nothing will work unless you do.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

In the affairs of this world, men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it.

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

Nothing succeeds like success. Get a little success, and then just get a little more.

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.

You can be passionate about anything.

If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.

Peace is liberty in tranquillity.

Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.

How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

The foolish man conceives the idea of ‚self.‘ The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of ‚self;‘ thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain.

My dad always said, ‚Champ, the measure of a man is not how often he is knocked down, but how quickly he gets up.‘

Even as you make progress, you need the discipline to keep from backtracking and sabotaging the success as it’s happening.