What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

The bird is powered by its own life and by its motivation.

The highest reward that God gives us for good work is the ability to do better work.

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

Competition is a sin.

Begin noticing and being careful about keeping your imagination free of thoughts that you do not wish to materialize. Instead, initiate a practice of filling your creative thoughts to overflow with ideas and wishes that you fully intend to manifest. Honor your imaginings regardless of others seeing them as crazy or impossible.

No man enjoys the true taste of life, but he who is ready and willing to quit it.

America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle. We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

Thought is the parent of the deed.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

Everything rises and falls on leadership.

If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings.

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

I do not live on false promises. I cannot afford to live on bad advice.

A goal is a dream with a deadline.

I think the great part about what I do is that there’s a scoreboard. At the end of every week, you know how you did. You know how well you prepared. You know whether you executed your game plan. There’s a tangible score.

I want to put a ding in the universe.

I like George Carlin’s jokes. I like his humor. He’s one of my heroes, and I like what he did with talking about everyday things.

Imagination rules the world.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

Talent without working hard is nothing.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

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.

Fashion is inspired by youth and nostalgia and draws inspiration from the best of the past.

Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn’t matter.

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

Mars is the only place in the solar system where it’s possible for life to become multi-planetarian.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

If you have passion, there is no need for excuses because your enthusiasm will trump any negative reasoning you might come up with. Enthusiasm makes excuses a nonissue.

Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.

Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

I shook up the world, I shook up the world.

You can’t knock on opportunity’s door and not be ready.

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

You have to motivate yourself with challenges. That’s how you know you’re still alive.

I believe God, Jesus, died that we not just go to Heaven but that we excel in this life. I never think you make money your goal… God wants you to excel. Just keep Him in first place, and God will open up doors you never dreamed of.

Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.

In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death… these are things that unite us all.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.

No one can pass through life, any more than he can pass through a bit of country, without leaving tracks behind, and those tracks may often be helpful to those coming after him in finding their way.

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.

Over the years I’ve seen people lose a spouse and then withdraw and lose interest in life, and I believe we need to resist that.

If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.

Eradications are special. Zero is a magic number. You either do what it takes to get to zero and you’re glad you did it; or you get close, give up and it goes back to where it was before, in which case you wasted all that credibility, activity, money that could have been applied to other things.

Because of your smile, you make life more beautiful.

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.

There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.

After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.

He shines in the second rank, who is eclipsed in the first.

I’m telling you there is hope. I have seen it, but it does not come from the governments or corporations. It comes from the people.

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you’re gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It’s yours. Seize your space.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand.

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

My mother had a saying: ‚Kamala, you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you’re not the last.‘