ATTITUDE

It is not the level of prosperity that makes for happiness, but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes are within our power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him. -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him.
Then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be.
Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within
his power to say,"This I am today; that I will be tomorrow." -Louis L'Amour

PHILOSOPHY
My philosophy, inessence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. -- Ayn Rand
 
ASSOCIATIONS
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. -- Mark Twain
LIFE
Drink wine, it's what remains of the harvest of youth - the season of roses and wine and drunken friends. Be happy for this moment, this moment is your life. -- The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam
TAKING RISKS
No Balls, No Babies - Mark Cuban
 
ACHIEVEMENT

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. -Theodore Roosevelt, 1910