If you are working on something that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.

Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.

If you develop a pure and sincere motivation, in you are motivated by a wish to help on the basis of kindness, compassion, and respect, then you can carry on any kind of work, in any field, and function more effectively.

Religion is a great force—the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get a man through his own religion and not through yours.

Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature; these are the spur and reins whereby al mankind are set on work, and guided.

Desire is the key to motivation, but it’s the determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal—a commitment to excellence—that will enable you to attain the success you seek.

Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around it comes to you; stretch out your hand, take a portion of it politely. It passes on; do not detain it. Or it has not come to you yet; do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you. So act toward children, so act toward a wife, so toward office, so toward wealth.

When I was a child, my mother said to me, "If you become a soldier you'll be a general. If you become a monk you'll end up as the Pope." Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

What we do now echoes in eternity.

How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?

A person with a clear purpose will make progress on even the toughest road. A person with no purpose will make no progress on even the smoothest road.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.

Conquer yourself rather than the world.

If you ask enough people, eventually someone will say yes.

When a person can't find a deep meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.

The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, the world will tell you.

The change in motion is proportional to the motive force impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

The day will soon come when I will show the world that the transmission of power and speech without the aid of any wires is possible.

But the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it.

Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.