The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is mere tenacity.

He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on.

I dream, I test my dreams against my beliefs, I dare to take risks, and I execute my vision to make those dreams come true.

Each well-born soul must win what it deserves.

One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.

Were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults in the first.

It is your decisions, and not your conditions, that determine your destiny.

Individuals are the sum of their unique experiences, challenges, and accomplishments. What matters is not the barriers they face, but how they choose to confront them. And their race is not to blame for everything—good or bad—that happens in their lives.

Have to and get to—both are choices. One is negative and one is positive. Choose the right one and it can change your life.

Pain is certain, suffering is optional.

Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaring evident which everybody had decided not to see.

The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness.

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes.

When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

Obstacles are like wild animals. They are cowards but they will bluff you if they can. If they see you are afraid of them, they are liable to spring upon you; but if you look them squarely in the eye, they will sink out of sight.

More is lost by indecision than wrong decision.

You cannot make progress without making decisions.

Half-finished work generally proves to be labor lost.

If we all can persevere, if we can in every land and office look beyond our own shores and ambitions, then surely the age will dawn in which the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved.

Continuous effort — not strength or intelligence — is the key to unlocking our potential.

There is a force that somehow pushes us to choose the more difficult path whereby we can transcend the mire and muck into which we are so often born. Despite all that resists the process, we do become better human beings.

And, more importantly, reach for the stars. And realize that it is never too late—not now, not ever—for you to pursue you passion, your pursuit of perfection. And most importantly, your perseverance for making it happen.

You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you're not passionate enough from the start, you'll never stick it out.