If you have never reached rock bottom, you have never attended the school of greatness.

A genuine smile is one of the world’s rarest treasures.

A fish that is afraid of drowning in a river is ignorant of its gifts.

A diamond earns its sparkle from the pressure it endures.

It is in the storm, not the calm, that a rainbow is born.

A determined seed cannot be hidden from the world, not even by dirt.

Calm skies don't make skillful eagles.

If you cry in the rain, only the sky will see your tears.

Birds keep singing beautiful songs, even if they have no audience.

Today's storms help you appreciate tomorrow’s sunshine.

Train the ears to hear more, the eyes to see more, the hands to do more, the feet to accomplish more, the mind to think more, the heart to feel more, and the soul to love more.

...there's the suffering from love and the suffering from grief - either pain permanently scars the soul...

We are never taught more deeply and more truthfully than by pain.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko is a ham actor, not a poet.

In death itself there can be nothing terrible, for the act of death annihilates sensation; but there are many roads to death, and some of them justly formidable, even to the bravest.

Charm is a product of the unexpected.

Follow the dream, work hard, inspire and be inspired.

There are cases when I can make myself better off by restricting my future choices and commit myself to a specific course of action.

The environment is the most important, the most fundamental, civil-rights issue.... Four out of every five toxic-waste dumps in America is in a black neighborhood.

Praying solves the problems of prayer.

You have to make something good. Just because all the hot actors show up and the money is there and the explosives are ready, it doesn't matter.