“It is only when you can admit you may be wrong and are willing to grapple with uncomfortable ideas that you stand to grow.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Courage is simply the commitment to do the right thing even when it is difficult.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Only by making your legacy your aim can you summon the courage to act with conviction in the moment, whatever that moment may bring.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“What if we could live a completely meaningless life full of pleasure and devoid of pain? Would we not be happy? Something deep within tells us no.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Why do we so desire fame? Because we desire to matter.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Whatever you find yourself doing at any moment is the most important thing in the world to you at that moment.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“An honest life starts with an honest assessment of self. You are neither worthless nor preeminent but somewhere in between.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“A lazy man often lacks the motivation to fight the very thing that has sapped him of his motivation.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“A man long enough sedated may no longer even realize he’s being sedated, or want to.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Entertainment is often just a cheap way to quench our natural thirst for meaning by encouraging us to exercise passivity when we ought to act with passion.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Meaning is not found in passivity. You must track it down with fervent pursuit and fierce endurance. Meaning must be earned.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“No one appreciates anonymity as much as those who have lost it, and you only get to lose it once.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“All fame is is being known by people you don’t know, and what’s so great about that?”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Wealth and fame may be consequences of success, but they are not success itself. You want to be great? Great. Why?”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“It’s not fair!” is the mantra not of the poor and oppressed but of the rich and spoiled. The poor and oppressed of the world don’t pout, “It’s not fair!”—they know the world too well to dare.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Each of us has only one life, unique from every other, and we all have reason to ask, “Why me?”, not in bitterness or despair but in awe and gratitude.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“You may be appalled by your world, but you must be gratefully appalled.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Your life has come at the expense of a nearly infinite number of other potential lives that will now never get to be lived because you get to live.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“You have but one life. You could spend it taking stock of what others have and resenting it, or you could spend it taking stock of what you have and doing something with it.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Categorizing yourself by either your victimization or your privilege fails to give any clarity to life’s fundamental question: What are you going to do with it?”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Wallowing in victimhood only demeans and paralyzes you. Don’t do it. Redeem it instead. Transcend it instead.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“A woman in labor never asks, “Why me?” because she knows both the cause of her suffering and its effect, and that sense of reason and purpose gives her the capacity to endure it.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Once you know who you are, you need not fear being misunderstood, or isolated, or bullied. You won’t care whether others respect you, because you know who you are.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Justice is the delusion of the self-entitled. To desire it is to desire a world that is not this world.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Whatever your world is, you are alive, and an incomprehensible number of things had to happen just the way they did for that to be the case.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Your aim has the power to turn every good into an evil or every evil into a good. Through it you interpret your past, give purpose to your present, and cast a vision for your future.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“My best teachers showed me respect by refusing to share in my low expectations.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“A goal is not the same thing as a wish. A goal is something you work toward; a wish is something you hope will happen to you.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Sometimes life’s most important moments begin with the casting of a seed, a small, uncertain act whose full significance becomes apparent only much later.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Imagine living your life so indelibly that others remember your smile long after they’ve forgotten your name!”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Worthy goals are always hard.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“If my family is the price of my success, then I am grateful to have had so little of it.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Neither lion nor gazelle question whether it is just for the lion to catch and eat the gazelle or just for the gazelle to get away and let the lion starve.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Justice is a fickle mistress, alluring but elusive, ever delivering less than she promises.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Spend your life chasing justice and only one thing is certain: You will have spent your life.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Only once you can truthfully say you are grateful for your victimization have you transcended it.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“There are many injustices that will simply never be made right, and to expect otherwise is to set yourself up to be consumed by frustration.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“To expect a hospitable world is hubris. Instead, expect the opposite. Expect a world that may destroy you at its whim at any moment.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Entertainment is not necessarily evil, but it is seductive and addictive. It can easily become an end unto itself, an end without end.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Be grateful for pain. Don’t ignore it or deny it. Don’t anesthetize yourself from it. Swallow it and make it a part of you.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“You are not truly yourself until you no longer define yourself in others’ terms.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“When the storm rages in the dark night, a voice on the wind will ask, “Who are you?”, and the quality and depth of your answer will determine whether you stand firm or flounder.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Anxiety and depression are your friends. They tell you there is something undone that must be done, something you must do. They demand action.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“Your moments of great risk are not yours alone. The decisions you make in those moments are of great import to a great many people—people of great import to you.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“You are not special, but you are unique.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“To be called is to be drawn by something outside yourself, something bigger than yourself.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“An essential part of figuring out who you are is taking your eyes off yourself and seeing everything that is not you.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“A teacher casts his work into the wind, knowing not where it will be blown, in hopes that a seed will land somewhere it can take root and outlive the one who cast it.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“What right do I have to the blessings I’ve received? None. They are not a right—they are a gift.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions
“It is no great accomplishment to take care of yourself—I’ve known children of ten or twelve who can do that. To become a true adult, you must become more than independent; you must become dependable.”
Source: The Talk: A Young Person's Guide to Life's Big Questions