Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered—either by themselves or by others.

If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.

Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction, and skillful execution; it represents the wide choice of many alternatives.

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.

Pain is certain, suffering is optional.

It is the responsibility of leadership to work intelligently with what is given, and not to waste time fantasizing about a world of flawless people and perfect choices.

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.

It isn't what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

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.

When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves.

If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owning more to patient attention, than to any other talent.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

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 in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.

Man is a universe in little.

Constant effort and frequent mistakes are the stepping stones to genius.

In the ordinary business of life, industry can do anything which genius can do, and very many things which it cannot.

Conceit spoils the finest genius… and the great charm of all power is modesty.

The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

Know yourself. Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.

You don't need another person, place or thing to make you whole. God already did that. Your job is to know it.

I simply believe that some part of the human Self or Soul is not subject to the laws of space and time.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.

You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

I could not understand how any man could be so brutalized as to claim the right to dispose of the lives of others, nor how any man could be so lacking in self-esteem as to grant to others the right to dispose of his life.

Cherish that which is within you, and shut off that which is without; for much knowledge is a curse.

Those who enjoy responsibility usually get it; those who merely enjoy exercising authority usually lose it.

The stability of the internal medium is a primary condition for the freedom and independence of certain living bodies in relation to the environment surrounding them.

You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I'll rise.

Thinking too well of people often allows them to be better than they otherwise would.

What the superior man seeks is in himself. What the small man seeks is in others.