We spend our lives, all of us, waiting for the great day, the great battle, or the deed of power. But that external consummation is not given to many: nor is it necessary. So long as our being is tensed, directed with passion, towards that which is the spirit of all things, then that spirit will emerge from our own hidden, nameless effort.

Our character is not so much the product of race and heredity as of those circumstances by which nature forms our habits, by which we are nurtured and live.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

Oh, give us the man who sings at his work.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

Satan wants us to constantly focus on everything that is wrong with us and look at how far we still have to go. But God desires for us to rejoice in how far we have already come.

Wisdom allows nothing to be good that will not be so forever; no man to be happy but he that needs no other happiness than what he has within himself; no man to be great or powerful that is not master of himself.

If my films don’t show a profit, I know I’m doing something right.

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

I fear that many a man’s good resolutions only need the ordinary fire of daily life to make them melt away. So, too, with fine professions and the boastings of perfection which abound in this age of shams.

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.

I always try to be smart. I try to treat all the money I’m making like it’s the last time I’m going to make it.

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

Sometimes in the past when I played something might make me lose focus, or I would go home after a game where I thought I could have played better and I would let it hang over my head for a long time when it shouldn’t.

The best way to sell yourself to others is first to sell the others to yourself.

The spiritual is the parent of the practical.

The truth is I love being alive. And I love feeling free. So if I can’t have those things then I feel like a caged animal and I’d rather not be in a cage. I’d rather be dead. And it’s real simple. And I think it’s not that uncommon.

Man lives for science as well as bread.

The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

It’s always appealing to play a character that has to overcome himself as well as an obstacle. It makes the drama so much deeper.

One must steer, not talk.

I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times.

Music will never go away, and I will never stop making music; it’s just what capacity or what arena you decide to do it.

Football changed my life and it gave me a platform to get out my aggression and it gave me a sense of value.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

I am just one human being.

Read the Bible. Work hard and honestly. And don’t complain.

Die to everything of yesterday so that your mind is always fresh, always young, innocent, full of vigor and passion.

Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.

I’m a very strong believer in listening and learning from others.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

My whole thing is to inspire, to better people, to better myself forever in this thing that we call rap, this thing that we call hip hop.

If you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.

When we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

I liked school, but I used to dread those moments when the teacher would call me up to give an oral report. I forced myself to deal with it and not dwell on the class in front of me – to keep a straight face, give the report and concentrate on getting it right. That’s normally how I perform. That’s how I am.

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.

Nothing in life is promised except death.

Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.

So many people think of me as a character on TV, but first and foremost, my passion is teaching dance and creating employable, working dancers.

I love being on stage, I love being able to tell a story, I love the fact that the audience listens and laughs at it. It makes me happy, and it’s what I live for.

Love is the flower you’ve got to let grow.

We need to internalize this idea of excellence. Not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent.

Because of your smile, you make life more beautiful.

What’s dangerous is not to evolve.

When I was 50 years old, I actually decided to draw up a list of half a dozen things that I really hadn’t done very well, and I was going to make efforts to improve. One of them was skiing, and I really did become a very much better skier.

I remember, when I was a young guy in the SEAL teams, I was very afraid of making mistakes and looking stupid or doing dumb things and getting a bad reputation.

Get busy living, or get busy dying.

There’s a victory, and defeat; the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.

Time and money spent in helping men to do more for themselves is far better than mere giving.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

Good governance with good intentions is the hallmark of our government. Implementation with integrity is our core passion.

A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

The one excellent thing that can be learned from a lion is that whatever a man intends doing should be done by him with a whole-hearted and strenuous effort.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

To live without Hope is to Cease to live.