Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

The purpose of meditation is to make our mind calm and peaceful. If our mind is peaceful, we will be free from worries and mental discomfort, and so we will experience true happiness. But if our mind is not peaceful, we will find it very difficult to be happy, even if we are living in the very best conditions.

I think the only way for you to grow and evolve is to keep listening, keep moving forward, keep jumping in and trying to experience.

Being from Colorado is, to me, very, very special. I'm just very thankful to be here. I'm also thankful to be a part of the history of this state.

The way I look at it, people pay me to travel. Once we get to the stage, that part is easy.

My junior high school teacher, Bennie Williams, was really more than a music teacher. She taught us poetry. She helped us put on school shows. She did all these kinds of things to help us stand in each other's shoes, and it was a really powerful time. That's when I discovered that I could sing.

I have learned that raising children is the single most difficult thing in the world to do. It takes hard work, love, luck, and a lot of energy, and it is the most rewarding experience that you can ever have.

Our challenge is to remind ourselves that we do have common interest, common grounds, and common dreams.

Diversity is valued, and it is prized. We learn to appreciate each other and each other's struggles. From diversity, we draw our enormous and our lasting strength.

If you have a good community behind you and a good family supporting you, then, when the buck stops with you, there is the strength of that community and that family to draw upon.

The keystone to justice is the belief that the legal system treats all fairly.

The good lawyer is the great salesman.

Being a lawyer is not merely a vocation. It is a public trust, and each of us has an obligation to give back to our communities.

I have been surrounded by some of the smartest, brightest, most caring lawyers, by agents who are willing to risk their lives for others, by support staff that are willing to work as hard as they can.

I think lawyers who engage in pro bono service to protect those who cannot help themselves are truly the heroes and the heroines of the legal profession.

I think, clearly, where you have a situation in which the Solicitor General tells me, 'I cannot in good faith argue a certainly legal position,' and if the president told us to argue that position, we would have to tell him, 'No, we can't do that, Mr. President.'

Peer mediation is a chance for students to work with other students to help them resolve problems, arguments, disagreements without having to get the teacher or the administration involved.

Let us develop an agenda for children that says we can do something about teen pregnancy. Let us make sure that parents are old enough, wise enough, and financially able to take care of their children.

What has too often happened in the past is that people have threatened punishment but have failed to carry it out. It's imperative in any initiative that is undertaken that punishment be real and that there be truth in sentencing, and that the truly dangerous offenders - the recidivists and the career criminals - be put away and kept away.

Schools can do extraordinary things given the chance; teachers can do remarkable things if we eliminate the paperwork that sometimes binds them and give them a chance to really teach in our schools.

For me, life is about experience and being a good person.

I enjoy working on a movie that lets your imagination run wild, it's great to be a part of and watch.

Eating when you're not hungry and taking in that amount of food is exhausting.

It makes sense that we came up with our public school system during the Industrial Revolution because it's like everybody is a factory worker, eating their terrible food and going back to the room where you're silent and listening to an idiot. That's an epitomizing idea, getting called 'Nothing' for your whole high school experience.

The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

The conscience of the world is so guilty that it always assumes that people who investigate heresies must be heretics; just as if a doctor who studies leprosy must be a leper. Indeed, it is only recently that science has been allowed to study anything without reproach.

Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

Playing on the Burj Al Arab helipad was an unforgettable experience, and the view of Dubai was incredible.

Experience is making mistakes and learning from them.

Life it is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics, it's about experience, it's about participation, it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious.

To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.

And then, build a bustling wonderful city of the 21st century, with a restoration of a spectacular skyline, which Manhattan, of course, needs. So, that is really the design as a whole.

I think there is a new awareness in this 21st century that design is as important to where and how we live as it is for museums, concert halls and civic buildings.

Festivals are the best because you can't control anything, and for a control freak like me, that's a wonderful experience.

In my experience, being busy and working hard is the key to sanity/happiness.

There's a theory about fame: the moment it strikes, it arrests development. Michael Jackson remained suspended in childhood, enjoying sleepovers and funfairs; Winona Ryder, an errant teen who dabbled in shoplifting and experimented with pills; George Clooney, a 30-year-old commitment-phobe, never quite ready yet to settle down.

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.

To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius - the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.

Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.

When you look at death, it makes you understand the importance of the moment when you have life and death in front of you, and you witness seeing someone deteriorating in front of you - it's an overwhelming experience. If you don't learn from that, I don't know what else you're gonna learn.

I'm really interested in women, particularly the kind of black woman who has overcome obstacles in her life and transformed.

Experience proves that in this life peace and satisfaction are had, not by the listless but by those who are fervent in God's service. And rightly so. For in their effort to overcome themselves and to rid themselves of self-love, they rid themselves of the roots of all passion and unrest.

Teach us to give and not to count the cost.

Among the many signs of a lively faith and hope we have in eternal life, one of the surest is not being overly sad at the death of those whom we dearly love in our Lord.

Above all, remember that God looks for solid virtues in us, such as patience, humility, obedience, abnegation of your own will - that is, the good will to serve Him and our neighbor in Him. His providence allows us other devotions only insofar as He sees that they are useful to us.

Man was created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord and in this way to save his soul. The other things on Earth were created for man's use, to help him reach the end for which he was created.