Oprah Winfrey

Do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do.

I’ve lived in this fame trip since 1986. I’ve found that unless you’re rooted in something bigger than fame, you start believing your own hype.

You get in life what you have the courage to ask for.

I know for sure that what we dwell on is who we become.

When you make loving others the story of your life, there’s never a final chapter, because the legacy continues. You lend your light to one person, and he or she shines it on another and another and another. And I know for sure that in the final analysis of our lives- when the to-do lists are no more, when the frenzy is finished, when our e-mail inboxes are empty- the only thing that will have any lasting value is whether we’ve loved others and whether they’ve loved us.

I was once afraid of people saying ‘Who does she think she is?’ Now I have the courage to stand and say, ‘This is who I am.

I’m wary of what goal I set, because then I’ll have to accomplish it.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Outstanding people have one thing in common: An absolute sense of mission.

Don’t be trapped by dogma-which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

The men who have succeeded are men who have chosen one line and stuck to it.

You can have everything in life that you want if you just give enough other people what they want.

Success is a state of mind. If you want success, start thinking of yourself as a success.

When somebody challenges you, fight back. Be brutal, be tough.

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.

We must become bigger than we have been: more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community.

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.

That’s how we do it… we give back to the people who made us who we are. We never forget that.

It might interest you to know that the 1828 Noah Webster Dictionary identifies the optimist in complimentary terms, but says nothing about the pessimist. The word ‘pessimist’ was not in our vocabulary at that time. It’s a modern ‘invention’ which I believe we should ‘dis-invent.’

To give away money is an easy matter, and in any man’s power. But to decide to whom to give it, and how large and when, and for what purpose and how, is neither in every man’s power, nor an easy matter. Hence it is that such excellence is rare, praiseworthy, and noble.

How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?