“If you do the things you need to do when you need to do them, then someday you can do the things you want do when you want to do them.”

“Even the choicest words lose their power when they are used to overpower.”

“One mistake I’ve seen people repeatedly make is that they focus too much attention on their dream and too little on their team. But the truth is that if you build the right team, the dream will almost take care of itself.” 

“Crisis doesn’t necessarily make character, but it certainly does reveal it. Adversity”

“You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have really lived, are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love.”

“To lead any way other than by example, we send a fuzzy picture of leadership to others. If we work on improving ourselves first and make that our primary mission, then others are more likely to follow.”

“Several years ago Dr. Maxwell Maltz’s book, Psycho-Cybernetics, was one of the most popular books on the market. Dr. Maltz was a plastic surgeon who often took disfigured faces and made them more attractive. He observed that in every case, the patient’s self-image rose with his and her physical improvement. In addition to being a successful surgeon, Dr. Maltz was a great psychologist who understood human nature. A wealthy woman was greatly concerned about her son, and she came to Dr. Maltz for advice. She had hoped that the son would assume the family business following her husband’s death, but when the son came of age, he refused to assume that responsibility and chose to enter an entirely different field. She thought Dr. Maltz could help convince the boy that he was making a grave error. The doctor agreed to see him, and he probed into the reasons for the young man’s decision. The son explained, “I would have loved to take over the family business, but you don’t understand the relationship I had with my father. He was a driven man who came up the hard way. His objective was to teach me self-reliance, but he made a drastic mistake. He tried to teach me that principle in a negative way. He thought the best way to teach me self-reliance was to never encourage or praise me. He wanted me to be tough and independent. Every day we played catch in the yard. The object was for me to catch the ball ten straight times. I would catch that ball eight or nine times, but always on that tenth throw he would do everything possible to make me miss it. He would throw it on the ground or over my head but always so I had no chance of catching it.” The young man paused for a moment and then said, “He never let me catch the tenth ball—never! And I guess that’s why I have to get away from his business; I want to catch that tenth ball!”

“One of the quickest ways to gain credibility with an individual, a group, or an audience is to borrow it from someone who already has credibility with them.”

“There is no achievement without failure.”

“Every time you speak to people, give them something to feel, something to remember, and something to do.”

“If you pair excellence with humility, people not only won’t run over you, they will respect you.”

“Nothing speaks like results.”

“Realize that the guys who criticize will minimize the guys whose enterprise rises above the guys who criticize and minimize.”

“analogy: It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

“Any married man should forget his mistakes—there’s no use in two people remembering the same thing.”