It takes a great man to be a good listener....

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not the world is full of educated failures. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

No enterprise can exist for itself alone. It ministers to some great need, it performs some great service, not for itself, but for others or failing therein, it ceases to be profitable and ceases to exist.

I have found it advisable not to give too much heed to what people say when I am trying to accomplish something of consequence. Invariably they proclaim it can't be done. I deem that the very best time to make the effort.

Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.

I don't think of myself as a poor deprived ghetto girl who made good. I think of myself as somebody who from an early age knew I was responsible for myself, and I had to make good.

Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation for it is better to be alone than in bad company.

A man is born alone and dies alone and he experiences the good and bad consequences of his karma alone and he goes alone to hell or the Supreme abode.

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long and the age of the great epics is past.