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.

You don’t develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.

No garden is without its weeds.

There is no education like adversity.

This is the mark of a really admirable man: steadfastness in the face of trouble.

When you don't come from struggle, gaining appreciation is a quality that's difficult to come by.

The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.

May your troubles be less and your blessings be more.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight.

I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

We don’t choose to be role models; we are chosen. Our only choice is whether to be a good role model or a bad one.

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 what we do with what is done to us.

Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.

More is lost by indecision than wrong decision.

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.

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

To appreciate the beauty of a snowflake, it is necessary to stand out in the cold.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story.

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.

No one can draw more out of things, books included, than he already knows. A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.

What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.

Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionately to their occupancy of your thoughts.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.

Much reading is an oppression of the mind, and extinguishes the natural candle, which is the reason of so many senseless scholars in the world.