Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.

Our life is what our thoughts make it.

I have always thought I was the best ever player.

It’s important for me to let my fans know I really don’t care. I’m confident.

Go as far as you can see; when you get there you’ll be able to see farther.

The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

I can’t tell you the number of times I looked down at what was going on on the ground, or I was engaged in a fight somewhere, and I knew within a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy. And I knew it because I’d done so much reading.

Everybody wants to be famous, but nobody wants to do the work. I live by that. You grind hard so you can play hard. At the end of the day, you put all the work in, and eventually it’ll pay off. It could be in a year, it could be in 30 years. Eventually, your hard work will pay off.

For unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.

There is little success where there is little laughter.

Don’t confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.

Some days I totally appreciate everything that’s happening to me, and some days I feel everyone’s waiting for me to mess up.

A wise man is cured of ambition by ambition itself; his aim is so exalted that riches, office, fortune and favour cannot satisfy him.

For some reason, I have better luck when I work with women. I guess I have a good sense of sisterhood.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

When the negative thoughts come – and they will; they come to all of us – it’s not enough to just not dwell on it… You’ve got to replace it with a positive thought.

Until you have cultivated the habit of saying some kind word of those whom you do not admire, you will be neither successful nor happy.

When written in Chinese, the word ‚crisis‘ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

One thing I’ve tried to never do is make wish lists. I try to have a very steppingstone mentality about this whole thing, where as soon as you make one step you visualize the next step, not five steps ahead.

When you have box-office results, Hollywood treats you different. Hollywood stands up. Once you get to the point where Hollywood sees that you create results, then the demand for you becomes higher.

If your only goal is to become rich, you will never achieve it.

We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.

My success comes in making fun of whatever you’re doing. That’s my way.

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.

You need to think outside the box. You need to think differently if you want to sustain what, for me, is my peak performance: the very best that I can achieve as an athlete every day.

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

People just don’t understand how obsessed I am with winning.

My songs are the door to every dream I’ve ever had and every success I’ve ever achieved.

The opportunities of America opened out to me the public schools. They carried me to the professional training of an American university. I began by working with my own hands for my daily bread.

It is necessary for me to establish a winner image. Therefore, I have to beat somebody.

Imagine your family finally making it from nothing to something, and finally getting things going, and finally buying a beautiful house and taking care of your children – and the next day, it’s completely all gone. Zero. Boom. Flat broke. So that’s when I had to man up.

You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.

People tend to play in their comfort zone, so the best things are achieved in a state of surprise, actually.

Each day brings opportunity for decisions for eternity.

If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.

Once you say you’re going to settle for second, that’s what happens to you in life.

People in their handlings of affairs often fail when they are about to succeed. If one remains as careful at the end as he was at the beginning, there will be no failure.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

If you have to stand and fight, you train yourself so that you’re able to do it.

A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.

Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved.

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

All of our problems start in our minds.

We only need so much to survive, but this world we live in tells us we need more stuff to be happy. We’re inundated with our televisions, the Internet and advertising that says in order to be happy you have to have these things. When you say, ‚Gimme, gimme, gimme,‘ you will always be in short supply.

Fame can take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them.

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.

The man who has done his level best… is a success, even though the world may write him down a failure.

Well begun is half done.

My success isn’t a result of arrogance – it’s a result of belief.

Public education is our greatest pathway to opportunity in America. So we need to invest in and strengthen our public universities today, and for generations to come.

Successful people will always tell you you can do something. It’s the people who have never accomplished anything who will always discourage you from trying to achieve excellent things.

You never achieve success unless you like what you are doing.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties, passing from one step of success to another, forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

With self-discipline most anything is possible.

I just hate meetings. Though it’s true that once you’ve made a lot of money, people around you might be full of ideas about ways to make lots more money and might be disappointed that you don’t want to seize every opportunity to do so.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.

What you put into life is what you get out of it.

As a producer, as a CEO of Hartbeat Productions, I am making deals to put my company in place to win, to put my staff to work so that while all this stuff is going on, they’re in the kitchen cooking. So it’s understanding the longevity of the entertainment business; you get out of it what you put into it.

I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.

But, you know, you can’t be a star at home.