Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved.

The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, But they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.

Cleopatra's nose: if it had been shorter, the whole face of the earth would have been different.

If someone had told me I would be Pope one day, I would have studied harder.

How can I fail when I have no purpose?

There is a difference between being called and being driven

Unless a man has trained himself for his chance, the chance will only make him ridiculous.

"I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble."

"As you fly over the North Atlantic Ocean you will see awesome icebergs floating in those cold and icy waters. If you look carefully, you will see a pattern develop: small icebergs move in one direction and gigantic icebergs move in another. The surface winds drive the small icebergs while the huge ones are controlled by the deep ocean currents."

A man died and went to heaven. When he met St. Peter at the pearly gates, he had a question. "Pete, I've been a student of military history my entire life, and one question has vexed me. Who was the greatest general of all? Was it Alexander the Great, Napolean, or some other?" Without pausing, Peter said, "That's easy--it was that man right there." And he pointed. The dead guy was stunned, "But Peter, I knew that man on earth. He wasn't a general--he was a janitor!" "Yes, but he would have been the greatest general who ever lived, if he had only been a general." How often we fail to live up to our potential.

If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you’ll find you’ve done it.

If you are living a hum-drum life, and you do nothing to change it, ten years from now you will be a product of ten more years of hum-drumidness.

Man transforms himself into the things he loves. When the time arrives for his sun to set, he has become that which, during the course of his life, he has, consciously or unconsciously, chosen to be."

We realize that what we are accomplishing is a drop in the ocean. But if this drop were not in the ocean, it would be missed. -- Mother Teresa

The world stands aside to let anyone pass who knows where he is going.

The child's temperament is more effective in constraining the development of the opposite profile than in determining a particular profile. The principle that a temperamental bias eliminates more possibilities than it determines also applies to the effects of environments. If all one knows about a group of children is that they were born to economically secure, well-educated, loving parents, one can be confident that they are unlikely to become criminals, psychotics, drug addicts, or homeless beggars, but one cannot predict what they will become. Similarly, among children born in poverty to single parents who did not graduate from high school, it is possible to predict the adult occupations they are unlikely to choose--curator of a museum, Wall Street stockbroker, or cellist--but not those they will select. Imagine a stone rolling down a steep mountain over a five-minute interval. An observer of this scene can eliminate a great many final locations after each few seconds, but not until the final second will the onlooker be able to predict exactly where the stone will come to rest.

You see this keyboard up here? They didn't just make this keyboard and then say, "What are we going to do with it?" They had a purpose for it first. Then they made a plan. Then they built it and wrote a manual to help it fulfill its purpose according to its plan. And then they put their name on it. It bears their name. And when it's broke you don't call a bricklayer. You call the manufacturer. And that's how God made you - for a purpose, according to plan, and he gave you a manual. And you now bear his name. {paraphrased}