What’s amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It’s so far away in time that they can’t appreciate what it means for their whole life.

Erudition – that is, reading, writing, and arithmetic – is taught in the schools; but where is the more important quality, character, taught? Nowhere in particular. There is no authorized training for children in character.

Energy, like the biblical grain of the mustard-seed, will remove mountains.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

I was a class clown. At 12, I was definitely clowning. I was making all the jokes. But I was smart, so the teachers didn’t know what to do with me.

I had so many people try to talk me out of starting a rocket company, it was crazy.

Don’t compare yourself with other people; compare yourself with who you were yesterday.

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.

I don’t think you get successful to brag and throw what you have in the world’s face. That’s all private.

If something’s important enough, you should try. Even if – the probable outcome is failure.

It’s when children are 15, 16 or 17 that they decide whether they want to be a doctor, an engineer, a politician or go to the Mars or moon. That is the time they start having a dream, and that’s the time you can work on them. You can help them shape their dreams.

Infinite striving to be the best is man’s duty; it is its own reward. Everything else is in God’s hands.

Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children.

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

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.

What troubles me most about my lovely country is that its children are seldom taught that American freedom will vanish, if, when they grow up, and in the exercise of their duties as citizens, they insist that our courts and policemen and prisons be guided by divine or natural law.

Example is leadership.

The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential… these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.

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

I’d rather be a victor than a victim.

I wanted to race cars. I didn’t like school, and all I wanted to do was work on cars. But right before I graduated, I got into a really bad car accident, and I spent that summer in the hospital thinking about where I was heading. I decided to take education more seriously and go to a community college.

Don’t worry about motivation. Motivation is fickle. It comes and goes. It is unreliable – and when you are counting on motivation to get your goals accomplished, you will likely fall short.

I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor.

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

We can succeed only by concert. It is not, ‚Can any of us imagine better,‘ but, ‚Can we all do better?‘

I can’t keep somebody from being a star, and I can’t make somebody a star, and nobody can.

Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.

Educationists should build the capacities of the spirit of inquiry, creativity, entrepreneurial and moral leadership among students and become their role model.

A hustler has to deal with danger and risk. It’s part of the game. You cannot control it all, nor would you want to. Chaos, unknown factors are not something to be anxious about.

What I tell my kids is, ‚I’m preparing you for college and for life. So, having independence, knowing how to set your own boundaries, figuring out how to make that balance. We still have screen-time rules.‘

I hated school. Even to this day, when I see a school bus it’s just depressing to me. The poor little kids.

The secret of success is constancy to purpose.

The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today.

I want to represent… to the kids to draw strength from me. So they can see that everybody goes through something, but you can rise up and do your best. Just try.

We don’t want to wait on someone to hire us and give us a check. We want to create our own opportunities.

Fun is one of the most important – and underrated – ingredients in any successful venture. If you’re not having fun, then it’s probably time to call it quits and try something else.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

I know what it feels like to struggle to get the education that you need.

Just as food eaten without appetite is a tedious nourishment, so does study without zeal damage the memory by not assimilating what it absorbs.

Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.

My message to all the activists is to just keep going, and I know it really may seem impossible and hopeless sometimes – it always does – so you just have to keep going because if you try hard enough and long enough you will make a difference.

This morning I lay in the bathtub thinking how wonderful it would be if I had a dog like Rin Tin Tin. I’d call him Rin Tin Tin too, and I’d take him to school with me, where he could stay in the janitor’s room or by the bicycle racks when the weather was good.

Education doesn’t change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher plane of regard.

I nearly failed when Virgin was in its infancy; I nearly failed in the early 1980s, and, of course, I have nearly died more than once trying to achieve a world record for boating or ballooning. But through a combination of luck and planning, both Virgin and I are still here.

When I was nine years old, living on the south side of Chicago, my father was a minister and my mother used to scrub floors. I had seven brothers and four sisters. I told my mama, ‚One of these days I’m going to be big and strong and buy you a beautiful house.‘ That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do with my life, is to take care of my mother.

When small men attempt great enterprises, they always end by reducing them to the level of their mediocrity.

The pace at which people are taking to digital technology defies our stereotypes of age, education, language and income.

For me, education was power.

The harder I work, the luckier I become.

People in their handlings of affairs often fail when they are about to succeed. If one remains as careful at the end as he was at the beginning, there will be no failure.

Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.

Irrespective of whether you have talent or not, one has to work hard. Just being talented doesn’t mean anything; you can end up wasting it before you realize.

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

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

Success is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody.

I just hate meetings. Though it’s true that once you’ve made a lot of money, people around you might be full of ideas about ways to make lots more money and might be disappointed that you don’t want to seize every opportunity to do so.

Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.

The best leaders understand the motivations of their team members and know their people – their lives and their families. But a leader must never grow so close to subordinates that one member of the team becomes more important than another, or more important than the mission itself.

When the first big paycheque with ‚Dumb And Dumber‘ hit, I went: ‚Gosh, I wonder if this will affect my performance. Will I do a take and think, was that worth $7 million?‘ But that never happened. If anything, it made me rebel against that thing when people who get rich start playing it safe.