Make yourselves nests of pleasant thoughts. None of us yet know, for none of us have been taught in early youth, what fairy palaces we may build of beautiful thought—proof against all adversity. Bright fancies, satisfied memories, noble histories, faithful sayings, treasure-houses of precious and restful thoughts, which care cannot disturb, nor pain make gloomy, nor poverty take away from us—houses built without hands, for our souls to live in.
If that’s the risk—to be loved you have to get second—I’ll take a few boos and hisses.
I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmitted into a power that can move the world.
Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
There is a geography of the soul. And in that world that exists inside you, you begin with no sense of direction. God, or the gods, is up. Earth, the cool mother, is down. You hang, suspended by a desire for each, between the two. This is the simplest of all things; all we can know is the stretch.
What ought one to say then as each hardship comes? I was practicing for this, I was training for this.
Beware of allowing a tactless word, a rebuttal, a rejection to obliterate the whole sky.
When you make a mistake, don’t look back at it long. Take the reason of the thing into your mind, and then look forward. Mistakes are lessons of wisdom. The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power.
Problems are not punishments—they are invitations to a higher level of thinking.
There are difficulties in your path. Be thankful for them. They will test your capabilities of resistance; you will be impelled to persevere from the very energy of the opposition.
There is no defeat in death, Master Bruce. Victory comes in defending what we know is right while we still live.
Movie: Batman & Robin
Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.
Thinking is easy, acting difficult, and to put one’s thoughts into action, the most difficult thing in the world.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.
Things are only impossible until they’re not.
Movie: Star Trek: The Next Generation
The capacity of person themselves is only revealed when, under stress and responsibility, they break through their educational shell, and they may then be a splendid surprise to themselves no less than to their teachers.
Cripple him, and you have a Sir Walter Scott. Lock him in a prison cell, and you have a John Bunyan. Bury him in the snows of Valley Forge, and you have a George Washington. Raise him in abject poverty and you have an Abraham Lincoln. Strike him down with infantile paralysis, and he becomes Franklin Roosevelt. Burn him so severely that the doctors say he’ll never walk again, and you have a Glenn Cunningham—who set the world’s one mile record in 1934. Deafen him and you have a Ludwig van Beethoven. Have them born black in a society filled with racial discrimination, and you have a Booker T. Washington, a Marian Anderson, a George Washington Carver. Call him a slow learner, “retarded,” and write him off as uneducable, and you have an Albert Einstein. As one man summed it up: Life is about 20% in what happens to us and 80% in the way we respond to the events.