“Happiness and freedom begin with a clear understanding of one principle.”

The world turns aside to let any man pass who knows where he is going.

Wisdom means understanding without any doubt that circumstances do not rise to meet our expectations. Events happen as they may. People behave as they will.

Keep silence for the most part, and speak only when you must, and then briefly.

Progress is not achieved by luck or accident, but by working on yourself daily.

Ruin and recovering are both from within.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the views they take of them.

Demand not that things happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do, and you will go on well.

First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.

To live a life of virtue, match up your thoughts, words, and deeds.

Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.

In prosperity it is very easy to find a friend; but in adversity it is the most difficult of all things.

I laugh at those who think they can damage me. They do not know who I am, they do not know what I think, they cannot even touch the things which are really mine and with which I live.

Do not try to seem wise to others.

Know you not that a good man does nothing for appearance sake, but for the sake of having done right?

When something happens, the only thing in your power is your attitude toward it; you can either accept it or resent it.

It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.

In the beginning, I took on every opportunity because I was so determined to get my name and music out there. You can get your sleep, but honestly, your brain needs a break, too, and so many people forget that.

Repeat a lie often enough and it begins to sound as if it must—or at least might—be so.

Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.

I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.

Men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin.

Anything played wrong twice in a row is the beginning of an arrangement.

The beginning is always today.