Wisdom

Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling five balls — work, family, health, friends, and spirit. Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged, or even shattered.

Life is not a race, but a journey to be savored each step of the way. Knowledge is weightless, a treasure you can always carry easily.

Ambition and satisfaction are at war. If you're ambitious, you aren't satisfied, and if you're satisfied, you aren't ambitious.

Being educated is an end in itself. It sets you apart from most of the people on the planet.

Our conscience must catch up to our reason, otherwise we are lost.

For every five minutes you spend looking into a mirror, spend five times that amount of time looking out at the world. Your happiness has a lot more to do with how you see the world than how the world sees you.

The hardest thing in the world is to let yourself know what you know. Because life is noisy. Everything we're told, everything about the way we're raised and educated and bombarded by our culture makes noise. And that noise makes it very hard to hear the ticking of our own hearts.

Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the Holy Book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.

At all costs try to avoid granting yourself the status of the victim. No matter how abominable your condition may be, try not to blame anything or anybody. The moment you place blame somewhere, you undermine your resolve to change anything.

Try to build and treat your vocabulary the way you are to treat your checking account. Pay every attention to it and try to increase your earnings. The purpose is to enable you to articulate yourselves as fully and precisely as possible.

Progress is not a straight line. It's a circle in which we strive to use all our talents and complete ourselves. Potentially, we are all winners.

Equality is the best insurance against the political upheaval that authorities fear. The means are the ends — and vice versa.