We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.

I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.

Your attitude towards failure determines your altitude after failure.

Fear clogs; faith liberates.

You have to be smart. The easy days are over.

Once you start doing only what you’ve already proven you can do, you’re on the road to death.

I’ve always felt that if I examine myself too much, I’ll find out what I know and don’t know, and I’ll burst the bubble. I’ve gotten so lucky relying on my animal instincts, I’d rather keep a little bit of the animal alive.

In so many ways, segregation shaped me, and education liberated me.

I always say, decisions I make, I live with them. There’s always ways you can correct them or ways you can do them better. At the end of the day, I live with them.

Some people will have to be afraid. Those who plunder the nation, deliver injustice, will have to feel scared of me. And I am not afraid of admitting this. Government cannot be so lenient that it forgives them.

The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?

I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss.

I’ve never been shy or secretive with the fact that if you walk into my life, you may be walking onto a record.

It’s absolutely normal that different human beings want to go different ways.

Even with my divorce and with everything, I don’t need money.

My mother did not like children.

Things don’t have to change the world to be important.

We cannot live being obsessed with what other people think about us. It’s impossible to live like that. Not even God managed to please the entire world.

What you have outside you counts less than what you have inside you.

In the long run, the sharpest weapon of all is a kind and gentle spirit.

When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do well, that’s Memoirs.

I think my worst problem is actually living in the moment and understanding everything that’s going on. I feel like I’m in my own bubble.

When I was 8 years old I became a mute and was a mute until I was 13, and I thought of my whole body as an ear, so I can go into a crowd and sit still and absorb all sound. That talent or ability has lasted and served me until today.

If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.

The more in harmony with yourself you are, the more joyful you are and the more faithful you are. Faith is not to disconnect you from reality – it connects you to reality.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others.

Libraries raised me.

Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.

I was bullied as a boy – lots of kids are, but hopefully most of us get on with our lives and grow up.

Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served. But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service which is rendered in a spirit of joy.

I want to thank God, obviously for the health, for the talent He’s given me, for my family who supports me, for the things that basketball’s taught me on and off the court. For the people that I’ve been able to meet through the game of basketball.

I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I’ve done that sort of thing in my life, but I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don’t know why. Because they’re harder. They’re much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you’ve completely failed.

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.

Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people – more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true – in certain rare, isolated cases.

It is better to do one’s own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins.

I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self.

I’ve been running a full marathon every year for more than 20 years, and my record is getting worse. Getting older, getting worse. It’s natural.

I got my own back.

If you try to protect yourself from pain, it becomes a stone in your heart. But the more you learn to face things, the more likely that stone can become a pearl.

You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.

Remind yourself that winning an argument or proving your point really gets you nowhere in the long run. Win through your actions, not your words.

It’s always wonderful to get to know women, with the mystery and the joy and the depth. If you can make a woman laugh, you’re seeing the most beautiful thing on God’s Earth.

The best thing I did was to choose the right heroes.

I’m tender on the inside.

I try to be the same person I was yesterday.

I found it hard to be young. When I was married in my twenties, I hated being regarded as ‚the little wife.‘ You don’t know what it was like then! I’d never even written a cheque. I had to ask my husband for money for groceries.

We should be too big to take offense and too noble to give it.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

The older I get, the more important the eternal becomes to me personally.

Indeed, it is as important to learn how to receive a blessing as it is to be willing to give one.

I love getting out of my comfort zone.

I defy gravity.

Where there is love there is life.

Only if you have been in the deepest valley, can you ever know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain.

Let each know that for each the body, the mind and the soul have been freed to fulfill themselves.

I think the tiniest little thing can change the course of your day, which can change the course of your year, which can change who you are.

Do not be very upright in your dealings for you would see by going to the forest that straight trees are cut down while crooked ones are left standing.

The first step in a person’s salvation is knowledge of their sin.

The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.

It’s certainly not wrong to want to be a better person. God gave us that desire.