In one important respect a man is fortunate in being poor. His responsibility to God is so much the less.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore and diverting himself and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary while the greater ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

There are powers inside of you, if you could discover and use, would make of you everything you ever dreamed or imagined you could become.

The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in which direction we are moving.

Emile Zola was a poor student at his school at Aix. We are all so different largely because we all have different combinations of intelligences. If we recognize this, I think we will have at least a better chance of dealing appropriately with many problems that we face in the world.

Ludwig von Beethoven had never mastered the elements of arithmetic beyond addition and subtraction. A thirteen-year-old boy whom he had befriended tried unsuccessfully to teach him simple multiplication and division.

Blaise Pascal used to mark with charcoal the walls of his playroom, seeking a means of making a circle perfectly round and a triangle whose sides and angle were all equal. He discovered these things for himself and then began to seek the relationship which existed between them. He did not know any mathematical terms and so he made up his own. Using these names he made axioms and finally developed perfect demonstrations, until he had come to the thirty-second proposition of Euclid.

Few men during their lifetime come anywhere near exhausting the resources dwelling in them. There are deep wells of strength that are never used.

Be brave enough to live creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You cannot get there by bus, only by hard work, risking and by not quite knowing what you are doing. What you will discover will be wonderful; yourself.

There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally. As nearly as we can, we must put ourselves in the place of those who uttered the words, and try to divine how they would have dealt with the unforeseen situation; and, evidence of what they would have done, they are by no means final.