If you really want to change a culture... empower women.

When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it's amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.

If you teach a boy, you educate an individual; but if you teach a girl, you educate a community.

If you really want to change a culture to empower women improve basic hygiene and health care and fight high rates of infant mortality the answer is to educate girls.

My father ended up starting the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre, which is on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. My mother started a school.

In times of war, you often hear leaders—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—saying, ‘God is on our side.’ But that isn’t true. In war, God is on the side of refugees, widows, and orphans.

Slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects.

You can hand out condoms, drop bombs, build roads, or put in electricity, but until the girls are educated a society won’t change.

When your kids accomplish something it means much more than anything you've done.

Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel.' Sign in Skardu

The tune was too ingrained for Mortenson to consider the novelty of this moment- an American, lost in Pakistan, singing a German hymn in Swahili.

Imagine the clouds drippingDig a hole in your garden to put them in

Don't be afraid to live. And hold onto the people you love.

Do your best when no one is looking. If you do that, then you can be successful in anything that you put your mind to.

Upon the lips of babes asleep I saw light embracing light and so allowed my syllables to rest there as a prayer they might sing in their dreams.

You are so near to my thoughts and my heart yet so far from my body and my arms... I once loved the whole world because you were in it.

At the heart of it, mastery is practice. Mastery is staying on the path.

It is impossible to give a soldier a good education without making him a deserter. His natural foe is the government that drills him.

Some people in Hollywood think of me as a model for dramatic midlife transitions: suburban housewife to Emmy-winning actress. But I never plotted out a master plan for following my dreams.

Russian literature, like colonial Canadian literature, comes with a lot of landscape backdrop.

Rappers kinda look stupid sometimes. Most of the time. I'm pretty sure I look stupid too a lot.