“I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth it?”

In order to live free and happily you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.

Aerodynamics is mathematics for those who haven’t learned to do calculus. In my case, too, for one who hasn’t learned to add or multiply, at least the first time.

There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn.

Every gift from a friend is a wish for your happiness.

Jonathan is that brilliant little fire that burns within us all, that lives only for those moments when we reach perfection.

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours.

When we hold something, anything, in our thought, then somehow coincidence leads us in the direction that we’ve been wishing to lead ourselves.

You don’t want a million answers as much as you want a few forever questions.

I am subject to that principle, in spirit and in belief of body.

Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.

Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully.

To fly as fast as thought, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.

Whatever steps we take, they’re necessary to reach the places we’ve chosen to go.

Study a lifetime and you see different colors from the same jewel.

Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.

The simplest questions are the most profound.

A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful.

Life is a lively process of becoming.

Before I became the ‘Great Test of the West,” I was the ‘Beast of the East.’

There is very little distance between being a fool and being wise; they are extremely close. When we are really, truly fools, when we actually acknowledge our foolishness, then we are way ahead. We are not even in the process of becoming wise – we are already wise.

I suppose, in a way, this has become part of my soul. It is a symbol of my life. Whatever I have done that really matters, I’ve done wearing it. When the time comes, it will be in this that I journey forth. What greater honor could come to an American, and a soldier?

The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. The kitten similarly becomes a cat on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them.

People only change when it becomes too dangerous to stay the way they are.

Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare