Living the right life is almost impossible if you have the wrong friends.

Is there something that those who are closest to you have been trying to tell you? Maybe you have an addiction, a hang-up, a weakness, a blind spot. If more than one person who loves you has been trying to help you see something that needs to change, maybe it's time to listen.

They showed me what a stable life could look like. If they hadn't bothered, how would I have even known there was another way to live? You can't aspire to something you've never seen.

Without remembering, wisdom is impossible (see comments on Exodus 10: 2). Wisdom is learning from our own lives and from the lives of others. Wisdom matters because good cannot be achieved without it. Good intentions without wisdom lead to either nothing or to actual evil. However much evil movements have appealed to the bad side of people's natures, almost every one of them, communism being the most obvious example, also appealed to people's good intentions.

The only happy people I know are people I don't know well.

I have a simple rule that is of great value in identifying whom to trust: Do not choose friends on the basis of personality, 'chemistry,' or enjoyment alone. Know their character (i.e. their values and whether they act on those values) before you trust them.

If a leader shows strong discipline, others will see it and cooperate with the expectations placed on them. At this point, leadership by example is crucial.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules whose would you use

It's said that a wise person learns from his mistakes. A wiser one learns from others' mistakes. But the wisest person of all learns from others's successes.

People tend to become what the most important people in their lives think they will become.

No one can understand that mysterious thing we call influence . . . yet . . . everyone of us continually exerts influence, either to heal, to bless, to leave marks of beauty; or to wound, to hurt, to poison, to stain other lives.

People say there are two kinds of learning: experience, which is gained from your own mistakes, and wisdom, which is learned from the mistakes of others.