Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.

My biggest skill is common sense. I understand life.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Do what nobody else can do for you. Omit to do anything else.

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.

Do you know the only value life has is what life puts on itself?

I thought I would be a guy on the radio.

If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must it not be our ambition to become men?

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

How do you know what it’s like to be stupid if you’ve never been smart?

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

Ever since I was a little kid, I wanted to be in combat.

Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

All honor’s wounds are self-inflicted.

What I can say is that all my characters are searching for their souls, because they are my mirrors. I’m someone who is constantly trying to understand my place in the world, and literature is the best way that I found in order to see myself.

Communication is a skill that you can learn. It’s like riding a bicycle or typing. If you’re willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of evry part of your life.

Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.

You’re just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You’ve got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

A man’s worth is no greater than his ambitions.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

I believe the first test of a truly great man is in his humility.

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.

You cannot push any one up a ladder unless he be willing to climb a little himself.

I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don’t always agree with them.

What good is it being Marilyn Monroe? Why can’t I just be an ordinary woman?

Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.

When I was younger, I was testing myself and questioning everything, but now it’s less about that and more about these are the years of my life with my family.

Sometimes we be playing the politics too much and forget who we are just to win.

The best is the enemy of the good.

One must steer, not talk.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

I break ground. I trailblaze.

Our lives are a sum total of the choices we have made.

I will govern my life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one and read the other, for what does it signify to make anything a secret to my neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of our hearts, all our privacies are open?

I know that I’m not the easiest person to live with. The challenge I put on myself is so great that the person I live with feels himself challenged. I bring a lot to bear, and I don’t know how not to.

In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

I was always told as a child by my mother that you always have to be impeccable, even when you go to bed.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

I think of myself more as a sportsman than I do an artist.

Some people have a hard time getting rid of stuff. If that’s you, pray for God to give you the courage to get rid of things you don’t really need or things He wants you to give away. This will help keep your surroundings organized and clutter-free.

I believe that God has put gifts and talents and ability on the inside of every one of us. When you develop that and you believe in yourself and you believe that you’re a person of influence and a person of purpose, I believe you can rise up out of any situation.

My life is mine to remember.

With ideas it is like with dizzy heights you climb: At first they cause you discomfort and you are anxious to get down, distrustful of your own powers; but soon the remoteness of the turmoil of life and the inspiring influence of the altitude calm your blood; your step gets firm and sure and you begin to look – for dizzier heights.

Men who have reached and passed forty-five, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.

If something can corrupt you, you’re corrupted already.

I think you’re working and learning until you die.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

The way for a young man to rise is to improve himself in every way he can, never suspecting that anybody wishes to hinder him.

People who use time wisely spend it on activities that advance their overall purpose in life.

The nobler a man, the harder it is for him to suspect inferiority in others.

If what you are doing is not moving you towards your goals, then it’s moving you away from your goals.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‚But how can it be like that?‘ because you will get ‚down the drain,‘ into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

Lots of songs aren’t even from my experiences, but they’re about accepting… the dark things about yourself.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

Adversity leads us to think properly of our state, and so is most beneficial to us.