“There’s a worthy and noble ambition: strength in the face of adversity. That is very different from the wish for a life free of trouble.”

You’re going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do and everything you don’t do. You don’t get to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose which poison you’re going to take. That’s it.

Who cares if you are the prime minister of Canada when someone else is the president of the United States?

Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us.

We believe that in reducing the scope and importance of our errors, we are properly humble; in truth, we are merely unwilling to bear the weight of our true responsibility.

To suffer terribly and to know yourself as the cause: that is Hell.

It is not virtuous to be victimized by a bully, even if that bully is oneself.

If you don’t say what you think then you kill your unborn self.

It’s appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve.

Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do.

See the truth. Tell the truth.

Thus, you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are.

You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act.

Women select men. That makes them nature, because nature is what selects.

People who know what to expect from one another can act together to tame the world.

When you have something to say, silence is a lie.

When the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia.

Yankees don’t understand that the Southern way of talking is a language of nuance. What we can do in the South is we can take a word and change it just a little bit and make it mean something altogether different.

People react to criticism in different ways, and my way is definitely to come out fighting.

The one good thing about failure is that it makes you consider doing things a different way.

Dreamers dream about things being different. Visionaries envision themselves making a difference.

I was the youngest child and really spoiled. I loved to play make-believe. I loved pretending to be all kinds of different people and it just seemed natural that I would go into acting.

Being humble means recognizing that we are not on earth to see how important we can become, but to see how much difference we can make in the lives of others.

Everyone is different: different shapes, sizes, colors, beliefs, personalities, and you have to celebrate those differences.

Grace means you’re in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.