I was nerdy and really into computers. I was a good student until my senior year, when I started traveling and had a lot of absences.

When I started skating, it was such a small community. You didn't aspire to be rich or famous or make a career out of it because that wasn't something anyone had done yet.

You might not make it to the top, but if you are doing what you love, there is much more happiness there than being rich or famous.

My youngest son's pre-school class was recently asked what their dads do for work. The responses were things like, my dad sells money, and my dad figures stuff out. My son said, 'I've never seen my dad do work.' It's true. Skateboarding doesn't seem like real work, but I'm proud of what I do.

The biggest lesson I learned from my dad is to support children even if they're doing something that is unorthodox.

The steady discipline of intimate friendship with Jesus results in men becoming like Him.

Don't simply retire from something; have something to retire to.

Bitterness imprisons life; love releases it.

God is not a cosmic bellboy for whom we can press a button to get things.

Life asks not merely what you can do; it asks how much can you endure and not be spoiled.

He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles.

The best way to look at any business is from the standpoint of the clients.

Everything needs to work at the same time. But what keeps society vibrant permanently is jobs, industry, business, and stuff like that. It pays for everything else. If you just build affordable housing, and those people don't have jobs, it'll no longer be affordable soon. So you really have to build around the business community.

In America, you keep on hearing productivity is low; secular stagnation, it's a new normal. It's just not true: We've had multiple wars; we're not educating our kids. We had government shut downs, badly-spent money, failures in the health system, failures and an extreme amount of regulation - that's why we're going slow.

America is best when we come together with clear leadership, expertise, and the political will to take on difficult challenges and get things done. No one should ever doubt the strength and resilience of our country and our democracy.

I think that technology is the best thing that ever happened to mankind. It's an absurd notion that somehow, 'My God, what are we going to do when driverless cars come along?' It's going to save lives on the road. And maybe, one day, we'll all be working four days a week and not five or six days a week.

When my grandfather was born, there was no healthcare. There were no airplanes. There were no boats. There were no trains. There were no communications. No Internet. No widespread knowledge. It will be a completely different world but a much better place in a hundred years.

America has the best hand ever dealt to any country on this planet, ever. Yes, we have problems, but you travel around the world, you'll see we have it all.

You can design a mortgage system that is different without a Fannie and Freddie, but there are principles you have to have, to have a good system.

I am convinced that it is not the fear of death, of our lives ending that haunts our sleep so much as the fear... that as far as the world is concerned, we might as well never have lived.

Caring about others, running the risk of feeling, and leaving an impact on people, brings happiness.

And though my Lord hath lost his estate and been banished out of his country, yet neither despised poverty nor pinching necessity could make him break the bonds of friendship or weaken his loyal duty.

For Pleasure, Delight, Peace and Felicity live in method and temperance.

I have learned the hard way to mind my business, without judging who people are and what they do. I am more troubled by the lack of space being provided for the truth to unfold. Humans cannot seem to wait for or honor the truth. Instead, we make it up based on who we believe people should or should not be.

In my deepest, darkest moments, what really got me through was a prayer. Sometimes my prayer was 'Help me.' Sometimes a prayer was 'Thank you.' What I've discovered is that intimate connection and communication with my creator will always get me through because I know my support, my help, is just a prayer away.

I don't think there's such a thing as a selfish prayer. Prayer puts you in communication so you can talk about whatever you want to talk about.

I had no preconceived idea what fame would be like, because I never thought I would be famous. I just wanted to do my work. Hell, I just wanted to pay my rent on time.

The remedy for life's broken pieces is not classes, workshops or books. Don't try to heal the broken pieces. Just forgive.

What a blessing that God allows a life to come through your body, and then allows you to place that body in a body bag and take it out. I had to say that there's a magnificent something that God has for me to do, to give me that level of completion. That level of experience. It's unspeakable.

I gave myself permission to feel and experience all of my emotions. In order to do that, I had to stop being afraid to feel. In order to do that, I taught myself to believe that no matter what I felt or what happened when I felt it, I would be okay.

In my mind, marriage is a spiritual partnership and union in which we willingly give and receive love, create and share intimacy, and open ourselves to be available and accessible to another human being in order to heal, learn and grow.

Some of us pray demands. Some of us pray complaints. Some of us pray knowing, and some of us pray not knowing. But prayer is the attitude that you hold in your heart.

It is an honor and a privilege to be of service and support; however, I realize people are not putting their confidence in me. Instead, they are actually learning to trust themselves. My job is to affirm and support them in the process and teach them to do what I do when I need strength: I begin within.

There is a lot of healing going on. Really! More people are vegetarians, more are in the green movement, more of us are tearing down the old paradigms and embracing same-sex marriage, single motherhood, men raising babies.

I'm the person that I always was, but in terms of how I approach my living, I'm not the same person at all. At all. I've buried a child, I've ended a marriage, and the grandson that I was raising is now grown. My family has totally shifted.

You know, if you're a human and living on the planet, it doesn't matter what you do; you are not immune to the challenges, the trials, the difficulty. And that fact that I happen to be a coach and a minister and a spiritual teacher doesn't mean anything. I'm still human.

Begin within. If it shows up in your life, it's coming to tell you something about you that you're acting like you don't know. Something about yourself, or your relationship with God.

I think as men begin to see things that address them, they will feel that they can relate. They can't relate to 'Basketball Wives,' 'Housewives of Atlanta.' I am not judging or criticizing those shows at all; what I am saying is the perspective is not necessarily the male perspective. 'Iyanla: Fix My Life' is inclusive of everyone.

I'm moving into that eldership age, you know? I'm at the 'wise woman' age where it's not about learning, but utilizing the information that I have in a way that serves other people. That's a high calling and it's a great responsibility.

Pain is pain, hurt is hurt, fear is fear, anger is anger, and it has no color.

I hope that my story, I hope that my life is... an encouragement for people, especially in Brooklyn. I feel humbled and blessed.

I try not to set myself up as different or as a celebrity or special. I have a husband that can get on my nerves. I have kids that test my patience. I've got a cat I can't keep off the sofa. It's real. On a bad day, I'm reading 'Acts of Faith.'

Conjugal love, or the friendship of spouses, can persist even after sexual desires have weakened, withered, and disappeared.

Aristotle uses a mother's love for her child as the prime example of love or friendship.

Friendship is a very taxing and arduous form of leisure activity.

Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.

The ultimate end of education is happiness or a good human life, a life enriched by the possession of every kind of good, by the enjoyment of every type of satisfaction.

Love without conversation is impossible.

Love can be unselfish, in the sense of being benevolent and generous, without being selfless.

The love which moves the world, according to common Christian belief, is God's love and the love of God.