“Still a dreamer, yet more of a realist than ever before, I knew this was my time to sail. On the horizon I saw the shining future, as before. The difference now was that I felt the wind at my back. I was ready.”

One of the things young people always ask me about is what is the secret to success. The secret is there is no secret. It’s the basics. Blocking and tackling.

Baby steps count, as long as you are going forward. You add them all up, and one day you look back and you’ll be surprised at where you might get to.

Find something that you love. Something that gets you so excited you can’t wait to get out of bed in the morning. Forget about money. Be happy.

Do something that you love. Whatever you’re going to do is going to be tough enough. Find something that gets you so excited that the sun can’t come up early enough in the morning because you want to go do your thing.

But if you don’t take the necessary steps to make them happen, dreams are just mirages that mess with your head!

No one ever laid out the sequence of events that led to my mother being prosecuted and imprisoned for alleged welfare fraud.

If you have a dream, you’ve got to protect it.

The secret to success: find something you love to do so much, you can’t wait for the sun to rise to do it all over again.

There was a language specific to all things. The ability to learn another language in one arena, whether it was music, medicine, or finance, could be used to accelerate learning and other arenas, too.

You can only depend on yourself. The cavalry aint coming.

This part of my life, this little part, is called happiness.

I just wanted to make a million dollars. But I couldn’t sing and I couldn’t play ball, so I said to my mother, ‘How am I going to make a million dollars?’ And she said to me, ‘Son, if you believe you can do it, you will.’

It’s okay to fail; it’s not okay to quit.

Then again, what seems like nothing in the eyes of the world, when properly valued and put to use, can be among the greatest riches.

The world is your oyster. It’s up to you to find the pearls.

Walk that walk and go forward all the time. Don’t just talk that talk, walk it and go forward. Also, the walk didn’t have to be long strides; baby steps counted too. Go forward.

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

That the Devil finds work for idle hands to do is probably true. But there is a profound difference between leisure and idleness.

There is no point in going into a business unless you can make a radical difference in other people’s lives.

Sports are such a great teacher. I think of everything they’ve taught me: camaraderie, humility, how to resolve differences.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

All men are the same. They just have different faces so that women differentiate them.

It’s our unlimited power to create and love in any circumstance that makes the biggest difference in the quality of our lives.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.