Be a free thinker and don’t accept everything you hear as truth. Be critical and evaluate what you believe in.
Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives – choice, not chance, determines your destiny.
The most important relationship we can all have is the one you have with yourself, the most important journey you can take is one of self-discovery. To know yourself, you must spend time with yourself, you must not be afraid to be alone. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.
The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.
The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
A fool contributes nothing worth hearing and takes offense at everything.
Wise people have an inward sense of what is beautiful, and the highest wisdom is to trust this intuition and be guided by it.
Criticism is something we can avoid easily
by saying nothing, doing nothing,
and being nothing.
Masculine republics give way to feminine democracies, and feminine democracies give way to tyranny.
Our problem is not that we aim too high and miss, but that we aim too low and hit.
Tyrants preserve themselves by sowing fear and mistrust among the citizens by means of spies, by distracting them with foreign wars, by eliminating men of spirit who might lead a revolution, by humbling the people, and making them incapable of decisive action.
Happiness is a quality of the soul…not a function of one’s material circumstances.
Anybody can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.
It is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil.
Life is only meaningful when we are striving for a goal .
The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life had been, and could be, different from what it is.
Only an armed people can be truly free. Only an unarmed people can ever be enslaved.
A friend of everyone is a friend of no one
Think as the wise men think, but talk like the simple people do.
The high-minded man does not bear grudges, for it is not the mark of a great soul to remember injuries, but to forget them.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it; men come to be builders, for instance, by building, and harp players by playing the harp. In the same way, by doing just acts we come to be just; by doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled ; and by doing brave acts, we become brave.
The tyrant, who in order to hold his power, suppresses every superiority, does away with good men, forbids education and light, controls every movement of the citizens and, keeping them under a perpetual servitude, wants them to grow accustomed to baseness and cowardice, has his spies everywhere to listen to what is said in the meetings, and spreads dissension and calumny among the citizens and impoverishes them, is obliged to make war in order to keep his subjects occupied and impose on them permanent need of a chief.
At the intersection where your gifts, talents, and abilities meet a human need; therein you will discover your purpose
