“I might be ready to embrace a snake, but, if one comes to bite you, I should kill it and protect you.”

“Motivation is the fuel, necessary to keep the human engine running.”

“You owe it to yourself, to refuse to surrender to obstacles that are meant to stop you from reaching far in your endeavours. Be determined that you will never be a captive of your environment.”

“You can’t build a relationship with everybody in the room when you don’t care about anybody in the room.”

“If your face is going to “talk” for you anyway, you might as well have it communicate something positive.”

“Any discussion of money and success would be lacking if I did not state that money is neither good nor bad. In the hands of good people, money can build places of healing, worship, and learning. In the hands of bad people, money can create destruction, disease, and death.”

“Extraordinary things only happen to extraordinary people. Maybe it's a sign that you've got an extraordinary destiny--something greater than you could've imagined.”

“One of the realities we're all called to go through is to move from repulsion to compassion and from compassion to wonderment.”

“There lay between them, separating them, that same terrible line of the unknown and of fear, like the line separating the living from the dead.”

“It was only in South Africa that I got over this shyness, though I never completely overcame it. It was impossible for me to speak impromptu. I hesitated whenever I had to face strange audiences and avoided making a speech whenever I could. Even today I do not think I could or would even be inclined to keep a meeting of friends engaged in idle talk. I must say that, beyond occasionally exposing me to laughter, my constitutional shyness has been no disadvantage whatever. In fact I can see that, on the contrary, it has been all to my advantage. My hesitancy in speech, which was once an annoyance, is now a pleasure. Its greatest benefit has been that it has taught me the economy of words. I have naturally formed the habit of restraining my thoughts. And I can now give myself the certificate that a thoughtless word hardly ever escapes my tongue or pen. I do not recollect ever having had to regret anything in my speech or writing. I have thus been spared many a mishap and waste of time. Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth. Proneness to exaggerate, to suppress or modify the truth, wittingly or unwittingly, is a natural weakness of man, and silence is necessary in order to surmount it. A man of few words will rarely be thoughtless in his speech; he will measure every word. We find so many people impatient to talk. There is no chairman of a meeting who is not pestered with notes for permission to speak. And whenever the permission is given the speaker generally exceeds the time-limit, asks for more time, and keeps on talking without permission. All this talking can hardly be said to be of any benefit to the world. It is so much waste of time. My shyness has been in reality my shield and buckler. It has allowed me to grow. It has helped me in my discernment of truth.”

“Never be discouraged. The fact that you will be a winner at the first attempt is unclear. You don’t get master’s degree after attending school on the first day. You got to endure till you get there.”

“The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy. A man does what he must - in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures - and that is the basis of all morality.”

“Our problems are no longer problems when we seek learning instead of leisure.”

“It doesn't matter where you are coming from. All that matters is where you are  going.”

“Take the broken pieces of your life, bake a master cake out of it. Don't stand still like a lake; keep flowing like a stream!