“The ultimate test of what a truth means is the conduct it dictates or inspires.”

The education of attention would be an education par excellence

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.

One of the greatest discoveries of our time is that a man can alter the state of their life by altering the state of their mind.

I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.

The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

That which is most personal, is most interesting.

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.

The sovereign cure for worry is prayer.

We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort.

The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact.

The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man’s thoughts and another’s.

A man with no philosophy in him is the most inauspicious and unprofitable of all possible social mates.

There is but one cause of human failure. And that is man’s lack of faith in his true Self.

Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.

When once a decision is reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.

What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire?

Prufrock had measured out his life with measuring spoons; Dubin, in books resurrecting the lives of others.

Inspiration is the greatest gift because it opens your life to many new possibilities.

People who have come from nothing and started their own business or opened up a whole new niche in a particular industry, they truly inspire me.

The things that inspire people to think are what keeps a film alive.

Everything we hear and see we need to evaluate—whether the inspiring writings of the Bible or the inspiring writings of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or George Eliot, of Ghandi, Desmond Tutu, or the Dalai Lama.

If I’m inspired and music inspires me, then I will continue to play it.

Perhaps I need some shattering experience to awaken and inspire me, or at least to give me some emotion to recollect in tranquility. But how to get it? Sit here and wait for it or go out and seek it? . . . I expect it will be sit and wait.