To accuse others for one’s own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

Education can become a self-fulfilling activity, liberating in and of itself.

It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

When you have a conflict, that means that there are truths that have to be addressed on each side of the conflict. And when you have a conflict, then it’s an educational process to try to resolve the conflict. And to resolve that, you have to get people on both sides of the conflict involved so that they can dialogue.

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.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

Someone told me something that stuck with me: ‚You have to envision your life, and then go backwards.‘ I’ve been living by that motto for a while, so I see where I need to be. Now I’m just backtracking and trying to get back up there.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

I am a big believer in education, because when I grew up in Austria – when I grew up in Austria I had a great education. I had great teachers.

Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.

I woke up one day and thought: ‚I want to write a book about the history of my body.‘ I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

If we could just find out who’s in charge, we could kill him.

Understand this law and you will then know, beyond room for the slightest doubt, that you are constantly punishing yourself for every wrong you commit and rewarding yourself for every act of constructive conduct in which you indulge.

No man can reveal to you nothing but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.

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.

As a kid from Compton, you can get all the success in the world and still question your worth.

Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

When I was a kid, I had a tendency to criticize. But when I did, my mum would whisk me off to the bathroom to stand in front of a mirror. Ten minutes, never less. To think about how criticism is a poor reflection on the one who criticizes.

I don’t go around thinking I’m Ray Bradbury all the time.

America’s experience, like many others, teaches us that fostering entrepreneurship is not just about crafting the right economic policy or developing the best educated curricula. It’s about creating an entire climate in which innovation and ideas flourish.

Well, I don’t think there’s any need for people to focus on my career.

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.

I have great respect for the past. If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going. I have respect for the past, but I’m a person of the moment. I’m here, and I do my best to be completely centered at the place I’m at, then I go forward to the next place.

America is becoming so educated that ignorance will be a novelty. I will belong to the select few.

It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.

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.

Many a man thinks he is patient when, in reality, he is indifferent.

Man’s enemies are not demons, but human beings like himself.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

Give whatever you are doing and whoever you are with the gift of your attention.

The conscience can be a strong guide in life if we allow it.

Don’t ever criticize yourself. Don’t go around all day long thinking, ‚I’m unattractive, I’m slow, I’m not as smart as my brother.‘ God wasn’t having a bad day when he made you… If you don’t love yourself in the right way, you can’t love your neighbour. You can’t be as good as you are supposed to be.

I am trying to find myself. Sometimes that’s not easy.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

It’s all to do with the training: you can do a lot if you’re properly trained.

I have enjoyed great satisfaction from my climb of Everest and my trips to the poles. But there’s no doubt that my most worthwhile things have been the building of schools and medical clinics.

Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It’s rage, it’s creativity, it’s pain, it’s hurt, but it’s the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music.

The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.

Vanity is great motivation, to be fair.

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

Military school was great and especially great for leadership and then I spent two years in Vietnam.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

I didn’t want to be a fashion designer, and for a good half of my career I didn’t like it. I always wanted to do other things.

Men must know their limitations.

I’m inconsistent, even to myself.

Experience is the teacher of all things.

Remember that your imagination is yours and yours alone. You have the inborn capacity to use it in any way that you choose. No one else is responsible for your imagination. Anything placed in your imagination and held there ultimately becomes your reality.

Hollywood is not suited for me, and I am not suited for it.

I just want to be myself.

All the learnin‘ my father paid for was a bit o‘ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

I have an expression I use as I’ve gone around the world through my career: ‚You never tell another man or woman what’s in their interest. They know their interest better than you know their interest.‘

I write from my soul. This is the reason that critics don’t hurt me, because it is me. If it was not me, if I was pretending to be someone else, then this could unbalance my world, but I know who I am.

I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It’s a natural process.

In all my days of schooling, from preschool all the way up to 12th grade, there was not one white person in my class. Literally zero.

Relationships are the hallmark of the mature person.

A child miseducated is a child lost.