To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.

I go to assume a task more difficult than that which devolved upon Washington. Unless the great God, who assisted him, shall be with me and aid me, I must fail; but if the same omniscient mind and almighty arm that directed and protected him shall guide and support me, I shall not fail – I shall succeed.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities. The thing is to get the work done.

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.

We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur.

I’ve done everything every fat person ever has. I’ve tried every diet.

The difference between us and them, between you and success, is not that you never fail, but it’s how you recover from those failures – is that you keep getting up time and time again. You figure out what you did wrong, and then you make it right. I say that to my kids every day.

If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

We will all fail in life, but nobody has to be a failure. Failing at a thing doesn’t make you a failure. You are only a failure when you quit trying.

I didn’t want to play it boring and safe. I also didn’t want to innovate too much. Second albums, man, they’re even scarier than first ones.

There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.

You might be tough, but you can only be so tough for so long, you know what I mean? The brain can only take so much damage. The body can only take so much damage.

The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.

The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.

The Lord gets his best soldiers out of the highlands of affliction.

I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.

Trials teach us what we are; they dig up the soil, and let us see what we are made of.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‚I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.‘

Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

What I want for my fans and for the world, for anyone who feels pain, is to lean into that pain and embrace it as much as they can and begin the healing process.

He who has faith has… an inward reservoir of courage, hope, confidence, calmness, and assuring trust that all will come out well – even though to the world it may appear to come out most badly.

No matter what happens on the field, getting an education makes you a winner.

Opportunity dances with those already on the dance floor.

Everything in the world may be endured except continual prosperity.

I assess the power of a will by how much resistance, pain, torture it endures and knows how to turn to its advantage.

I don’t have much positive to say about motor neuron disease, but it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I still could do. I’m happier now than before I developed the condition.

The farmer has to be an optimist or he wouldn’t still be a farmer.

It’s the philosophies of being an athlete that carry me today.

Character is formed in the stormy billows of the world.

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.

Hundreds of people who’ve never written before send in ‚Dr. Who‘ scripts. They may have good ideas, but what they fail to realise is that writing for TV is incredibly complicated. They have no idea how difficult it is and what the financial commitment is.

While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.

A lot of people tell me a lot of things about my conduct, my game, my future… but I try to stay away from their words of wisdom. I don’t let it distract me. On the field, you will be facing the ball alone. If you fail, you will the only one to blame. So, you should be the one deciding for yourself.

In England, when an athlete gets to the top, we do our best to destroy him.

To endure is the first thing that a child ought to learn, and that which he will have the most need to know.

My faith was tested like Job. That’s the message I try to tell other people: just because you believe in God, serve God, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, people gotta realize, it don’t mean things not gonna happen to you.

I think we have a good chance of surviving long enough to colonize the solar system.

All great achievements require time.

Writing is challenging work because it’s so easy to get consumed with how it’s going, what’s going to happen to it, who’s going to like or not like it. You want to get all of that stuff out of your head and just let the work flow.

I’m on record that it didn’t really traumatize me to do away with some people.

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.

And God help Bruce Springsteen when they decide he’s no longer God… They’ll turn on him, and I hope he survives it.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

Making a film is like putting out a fire with sieve. There are so many elements, and it gets so complicated.

I have bad reflexes. I was once run over by a car being pushed by two guys.

Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

Players who are not from the U.K. have to get used to the winds. I have to adapt my style as a result as well. Often, you are forced to keep things simple.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

You fail only if you stop writing.

Through perseverance many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure.

Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable.

Genius always gives its best at first; prudence, at last.

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

When facing a difficult task, act as though it is impossible to fail. If you are going after Moby Dick, take along the tartar sauce.

I’ve had all six of my books reach the New York Times bestseller list, which is especially rewarding seeing as I flunked out of high school twice because I couldn’t write. It just goes to show you that we learn from our mistakes.

As our enemies have found we can reason like men, so now let us show them we can fight like men also.

Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.

I grew up as this very carefree, happy kid then things turned darker for me. Maybe it was because I saw that the world wasn’t as happy a place as I had hoped it would be for me.