Manage yourself first and others will take your orders.

Modern science knows much about such conflicts. We call the mental state that engenders it "ambivalence": a collision between thought and feeling.

Enthusiasm is the best protection in any situation. Wholeheartedness is contagious. Give yourself, if you wish to get others.

We learn courageous action by going forward whenever fear urges us back.

Intellectual comradeship requires that you think your thoughts through to the place where you can make the complex seem simple, the obscure quite clear.

A wise unselfishness is not a surrender of yourself to the wishes of anyone, but only to the best discoverable course of action.

He who doesn't consider himself is seldom considerate of others.

Courage and conviction are powerful weapons against an enemy who depends only on fists or guns. Animals know when you are afraid; a coward knows when you are not.

Courage and conviction are powerful weapons.

Nature is at work. Character and destiny are her handiwork. She gives us love and hate, jealousy and reverence. All that is ours is the power to choose which impulse we shall follow.

Good humor isn't a trait of character, it is an art which requires practice.

I always return from my travels with new books.

I normally don't do requests. Unless, of course, I have been asked to do so.

The name of this book is mysterious.

Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.

Music scores your life. You interact with it. It becomes the soundtrack to that one summer with that one girl.

They say the breaks even up in the long run, and the trick is to be a long-distance runner.

The hand that gives, gathers.

My intention is not to repudiate an African American identity but perhaps to resist how labels take hold, or to make it as slow a process as possible. That's more my sense of it.

I have opinions on everything. I'm a stubborn old mule. The biggest problem is keeping my mouth shut.

College isn't necessary for everybody and it's only from what you put into it what you go there for.