The point of the adversity is to toughen your mind so that you can handle difficult circumstances in life. Your mind, toughen just like you toughen your body. So it really depends on what you need. It really depends on the individual.

If you want to be powerful in life you have to enjoy the process. You have to get pleasure out of making the thing that you're making. There has to be that kind of purpose behind it. If your purpose is simply gaining power, if that becomes your end in life then you end up sort of destroying yourself because you lose the sense of detachment that's very necessary.

What's good for me is certainly not good for other people.

The real poetry and beauty in life comes from an intense relationship with reality in all its aspects. Realism is in fact the ideal we must aspire to, the highest point of human rationality.

All the most successful people nowadays who are truly successful and innovative in their field are not people motivated by money.

Hangs in the uncertain balance of proud time.

Those qualities that separate us are often ridiculed by others or criticized by teachers. Because of these judgments, we might see our strengths as disabilities and try to work around them in order to fit in. But anything that is peculiar to our makeup is precisely what we must pay the deepest attention to and lean on in our rise to mastery.