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

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.

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and half-shut afterwards.

More is lost by indecision than wrong decision.

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.

Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.

There is a force that somehow pushes us to choose the more difficult path whereby we can transcend the mire and muck into which we are so often born. Despite all that resists the process, we do become better human beings.

Pain is certain, suffering is optional.

I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.

But we cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever.

Were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults in the first.

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

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.

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

The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness.

Are you one of the flock that follows, or Are you one that shall lead the way?

Instead of dirt and poison we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.

Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.

The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes.

I must be a mermaid, I have no fear of depths, and a great fear of shallow living.

Life's blows cannot break a person whose spirit is warmed at the fire of enthusiasm!

Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favor; for even dearth is one of the things that Nature wills.

There is nothing happens to any person but what was in his power to go through with.

A scepter snatched with an unruly hand must be as boisterously maintained as gained; and he that stands upon a slippery place makes nice of no vile hold to stay him up.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.

Without some goals and some efforts to reach it, no man can live.

Here must all distrust be left behind; all cowardice must be ended.

Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all—the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved.

No all storms come to disrupt your life, some come to clear your path.

Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.