Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.

Remembering what you’ve been through and how that has strengthened your mindset can lift you out of a negative brain loop and help you bypass those weak, one-second impulses to give in. Even if you’re feeling low and beat down by life right now, I guarantee you can think of a time or two when you overcame odds and tasted success.

We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

I do have motivation. A lot of motivation.

It is natural to want to have a future.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

And so you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.

Bill Gates has always been a mentor and inspiration for me even before I knew him. Just growing up, I admired how Microsoft was mission-focused.

People who pity themselves think, ‚Why would I try to do anything? I’ll just fail.‘

The harder I work, the luckier I become.

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.

As a father, I always want my son to be perfect. When he was young, I tried to train him in martial arts, but he said, ‚I don’t want to become like Bruce Lee’s son, with everybody telling me how good my father was.‘ I just think my son is too lazy.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.

If you tell me there’s something I can’t do, I’ll want to do it even more. Especially when it comes to entertaining.

Fighting for one’s freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.

I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.

For novelists or musicians, if they really want to create something, they need to go downstairs and find a passage to get into the second basement. What I want to do is go down there, but still stay sane.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.

Whatever you have, you must either use or lose.

While we may lose heart, we never have to lose hope.

Always have something beautiful in sight, even if it’s just a daisy in a jelly glass.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

I always have to be writing.

If you are a small company taking on a big company, you need to have a sense of humor.

I didn’t want to become a professor or get tenure or teach or anything. All I wanted to do was get a degree because Louis Leakey said I needed one, which was right, and once I succeeded I could get back to the field.

Execute every act of thy life as though it were thy last.

Love is easy, and I love writing. You can’t resist love. You get an idea, someone says something, and you’re in love.

The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin – find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

A great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.

Winning is the most important. Everything is consequence of that.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.

When your dream is bigger than you are, you only have two choices: give up or get help.

Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.

All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.

What is true of the individual will be tomorrow true of the whole nation if individuals will but refuse to lose heart and hope.

When a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dream.

Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

One’s only rival is one’s own potentialities. One’s only failure is failing to live up to one’s own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Defeat doesn’t finish a man, quit does. A man is not finished when he’s defeated. He’s finished when he quits.

There is no man living that can not do more than he thinks he can.

Remember your dreams and fight for them. You must know what you want from life. There is just one thing that makes your dream become impossible: the fear of failure.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

I always knew that St. Jude was an amazing organization but meeting the kids and seeing how the hospital works first hand was truly beautiful. It doesn’t feel like a regular hospital all dreary and sad. It’s a colorful, beautiful, comfortable, fun place to live and the energy is wonderful.

The richest people in the world look for and build networks; everyone else looks for work.

Protect your enthusiasm from the negativity of others.

If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.

It generally happens that assurance keeps an even pace with ability.

To love one that is great, is almost to be great one’s self.

Where sense is wanting, everything is wanting.

I just have an enthusiasm for life.

See, when you drive home today, you’ve got a big windshield on the front of your car. And you’ve got a little bitty rearview mirror. And the reason the windshield is so large and the rearview mirror is so small is because what’s happened in your past is not near as important as what’s in your future.

I think there are a number of things that you can do to encourage your kids‘ dreams, but I do believe in speaking by experience of having a lot of help along the way, stumbling in the past. We’ve all stumbled, and we certainly all deserve to get up and walk again.

One strength of the communist system of the East is that it has some of the character of a religion and inspires the emotions of a religion.

In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing.

Many times, we miss out on God’s best because we give up too soon. We don’t realize how close we are to victory.

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.