I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.

The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of your life. If you don't, life controls you.

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

Our life does not develop as a result of chance, but as a result of causes.

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

Unsuccessful people make decisions based on current situations. Successful people make decisions based on where they want to be.

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the induction of a new order of things.

For what it’s worth: It’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over.

Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't.

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.

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

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.

Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or good or joy worth having.

It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.

As a rule, we find what we look for; we achieve what we get ready for.

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease to exist at death.

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.

There is nothing in the world that empowers a human being to overcome external difficulties or internal hardships so much as the awareness that one has a task in life.