You may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me like a trifle, but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work, I had earned a dollar. I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time.

I’ve felt like an outsider all my life. It comes from my mother, who always felt like an outsider in my father’s family. She was a powerful woman, and she motivated my father.

Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.

If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked.

I know Elon, we’re very like minded in many ways. We’re not conceptual twins. One thing I want us to do is go to Mars, but for me it’s one thing. He’s singularly focused on that. I think motivation wise, for me I don’t find that Plan B idea motivating. I don’t want a plan B for Earth, I want Plan B to make sure Plan A works.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

I stayed focused, and I never surrendered, and now I’ve been blessed. now I take care of my mother, my father, and my entire whole family.

We all have a tendency to avoid our weaknesses. When we do that, we never progress or get any better.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

If someone you know makes a bad decision or uses bad judgment, it doesn’t mean you have to allow that to alter your attitude. Why should you allow anyone else’s bad decisions to send you into a tailspin of misery?

Growth is the great separator between those who succeed and those who do not. When I see a person beginning to separate themselves from the pack, it’s almost always due to personal growth.

You don’t sign up for a divorce when you get married. It’s very painful. But it’s taught me a great deal about myself.

Sometimes you have to take two steps back to take ten forward.

A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success.

For a long time, I thought I was ugly and disfigured. This made me shy and timid, and I often reacted to insults that were not intended.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

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

A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.

Little by little, not by making big promises, I need to be calmer, read more, spend more time with my loved ones, and be more mindful about nature and environment.

If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.

I think beating myself up sometimes and knowing I am not happy when I do it makes me work harder to do a good job.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don’t.

Overall there’s going to be things I’m not great at.

Ideas can be life-changing. Sometimes all you need to open the door is just one more good idea.

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

It’s not the load that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it.

Control your own destiny! Control your own destiny!

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.

Money does not change people, people change.

Acting helped me as I was growing up. It helped me learn about myself, helped me travel, helped me understand life, express myself, all those wonderful things. So I’m very, very grateful; it’s a fun job. It’s a luxury.

I don’t believe we are supposed to go through life defeated and not having enough money to pay our bills or send our kids to college.

I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end… I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

I’m a big believer in doing things that make you uncomfortable. So, we live in a world where we want to be as comfortable as we can. And we wonder why we have no growth. We wonder why – when the smallest thing in our life gets difficult – we wonder why we cower and we run away.

When new turns of behavior cease to appear in the life of the individual, its behavior ceases to be intelligent.

For some reason I did something where I realized I could get a reaction. That was when I broke out of my shell at school, because I really didn’t have any friends or anything like that and I just kind of was going along, and then finally I did this zany thing, and all of a sudden I had tons of friends.

Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become.

Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent.

I’ve done everything I wanted to do, even if I have had to pay a very high price – which has been the case most of the time.

I like to recede away from classifications. You might say that indicates a fundamental lack of commitment. I suppose that’s true to some degree.

I get up every morning and say, ‚Father, give me strength today, not strength so I can lift 500 pounds, but give me strength, Lord, so when I speak, my words might motivate, might inspire somebody, Lord, when they see me, let them see you. When they hear me, Lord, let them hear you. In your holy name I pray.‘

What? You seek something? You wish to multiply yourself tenfold, a hundredfold? You seek followers? Seek zeros!

I’d have stopped writing years ago if it were for the money.

He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money.

Don’t be a writer; it’s a terrible way to live your life. There’s nothing to be gained from it but poverty and obscurity and solitude. So if you have a taste for all those things, which means that you really are burning to do it, then go ahead and do it. But don’t expect anything from anybody.

Begin with the end in mind.

The book you don’t read won’t help.

The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.

The power for creating a better future is contained in the present moment: You create a good future by creating a good present.

People are looking for something a little more stable; people are feeling like they need to get closer to God.

Your life is like a play with several acts. Some of the characters who enter have short roles to play, others, much larger. Some are villains and others are good guys. But all of them are necessary; otherwise, they wouldn’t be in the play. Embrace them all, and move on to the next act.

When people are around us, they should leave better off than they were previously. Rather than feeling discouraged or defeated, people should feel challenged and inspired after spending any time with you and me.

I want the troops from Great Britain and the U.S. to be successful, but by the same token, Afghanistan has always been a screw-up.

A great man is always willing to be little.

Most people have the opportunity of a lifetime flash right in front of them, and they fail to see it. A year later, they find out about it, after everyone else got rich.

When we tell the story of our own conversion, I would have it done with great sorrow, remembering what we used to be, and with great joy and gratitude, remembering how little we deserve these things.

I’m an introvert somewhat. There could be a room full of people, I’ll go stand in the corner.