“People don’t learn from people they don’t value.”

“start their day on the “wrong foot.” They feel all right when they wake up, but as soon as something goes wrong, they lose their footing and walk with a “loser’s limp” the rest of the day. Once they are off to a bad start, it seems they never catch up.”

“If I were to remain silent, I'd be guilty of complicity.”

“For the others, we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson. —”

“People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.”

“Gratitude asks, “Why me? Why do I get all that I have?” David modeled this kind of gratitude when he prayed, “Who am I, O Sovereign LORD, and what is my family, that you have brought me this far?”15 Years later, his son would write, “It is better to be satisfied with what you have than to be always wanting something else.”

“The marriage partner is not really the problem. No other person can ultimately make you happy. You must learn how to be happy within yourself.” 

“Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and there discovered was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.”

“I am not what happened to me; I am what I choose to become.”

“Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.”

“My parents constantly drummed into me the importance of judging people as individuals. There was no more grievous sin at our household than a racial slur or other evidence of religious or racial intolerance. A lot of it, I think, was because my dad had learned what discrimination was like firsthand. He’d grown up in an era when some stores still had signs at their door saying, NO DOGS OR IRISHMEN ALLOWED. When my brother and I were growing up, there were still ugly tumors of racial bigotry in much of America, including the corner of Illinois where we lived. At our one local movie theater, blacks and whites had to sit apart—the blacks in the balcony. My mother and father urged my brother and me to bring home our black playmates, to consider them equals, and to respect the religious views of our friends, whatever they were. My brother’s best friend was black, and when they went to the movies, Neil sat with him in the balcony. My mother always taught us: “Treat thy neighbor as you would want your neighbor to treat you,” and “Judge everyone by how they act, not what they are.” Once my father checked into a hotel during a shoe-selling trip and a clerk told him: “You’ll like it here, Mr. Reagan, we don’t permit a Jew in the place.” My father, who told us the story later, said he looked at the clerk angrily and picked up his suitcase and left. “I’m a Catholic,” he said. “If it’s come to the point where you won’t take Jews, then some day you won’t take me either.” Because it was the only hotel in town, he spent the night in his car during a winter blizzard and I think it may have led to his first heart attack.”

“No man has a chance to enjoy permanent success until he begins to look in a mirror for the real cause of all his mistakes

“God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in this world, and that mechanism is called suffering.”

“You cannot hang out with negative people and expect to live a positive life.”

“Sometimes when people feel strongly about something, that is all they preach about. That is wrong. There needs to be a balance. We need to use common sense even in our spiritual life.