Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do.

Imagine for a moment that each one of us takes only a little more care for each hour of his days, that he demands in it a little more of elegance and intensity; then, multiplying all these minute pressures toward the perfecting and deepening of each life by all the others, calculate for yourselves the gigantic enrichment, the fabulous ennobling which this process would create for human society.

Life is fired at us point blank.

Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us - by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. 'To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law.'

Life is a struggle with things to maintain itself among them. Concepts are the strategic plan we form in answer to the attack.

Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.

Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been.