The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can't make it through one door, I'll go through another door - or I'll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.
Rabindranath Tagore

No matter how much you think you love somebody, you'll step back when the pool of their blood edges up too close.
Chuck Palahniuk

People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.
Andrew Carnegie

As far as service goes, it can take the form of a million things. To do service, you don't have to be a doctor working in the slums for free, or become a social worker. Your position in life and what you do doesn't matter as much as how you do what you do.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.
Nikola Tesla

What convinces is conviction. Believe in the argument you're advancing. If you don't you're as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn't there, and no chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win your case for you.
Lyndon B. Johnson

The presidency has made every man who occupied it, no matter how small, bigger than he was; and no matter how big, not big enough for its demands.
Lyndon B. Johnson

I don't believe I'll ever get credit for anything I do in foreign affairs, no matter how successful it is, because I didn't go to Harvard.
Lyndon B. Johnson

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
Robert A. Heinlein

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.
Robert A. Heinlein

Every time I go to a movie, it's magic, no matter what the movie's about.
Steven Spielberg

All action results from thought, so it is thoughts that matter.
Sai Baba

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.
e. e. cummings

No matter how vast, how total, the failure of man here on earth, the work of man will be resumed elsewhere. War leaders talk of resuming operations on this front and that, but man's front embraces the whole universe.
Henry Miller

Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him.
Henry Miller

There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him.
Henry Miller

What does it matter how one comes by the truth so long as one pounces upon it and lives by it?
Henry Miller

I've always looked for the perfect life to step into. I've taken all the paths to get where I wanted.But no matter where I go, I still come home me.
Layne Staley

No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up.
Lily Tomlin