Your first and foremost job as a leader is to take charge of your own energy and then to help to orchestrate the energy of those around you.

...the individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be...The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.

If a businessman makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences. If a bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences.

The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion.

Don't let your ego get too close to your position, so that if your position gets shot down, your ego doesn't go with it.

Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.

Howsoever you may repair it, a rift is a rift.

We should never permit ourselves to do anything that we are not willing to see our children do. We should set them an example that we wish them to imitate.

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.