Regarding one's career: always be prepared, no short cuts - hard work is the only alternative that really works.
Black money is so much a part of our white economy, a tumour in the centre of the brain - try to remove it and you kill the patient.
Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.
The whole quilt is much more important than any single square.
. . . you have to use your failures as stepping stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair. In the end it’s all a question of balance.
. . . the face has limited space. My mother used to say, if you fill your face with laughing, there will be no more room for crying.
What folly made young people, even those in middle age, think they were immortal? How much better, their lives, if they could remember the end. Carrying your death with you every day would make it hard to waste time on unkindness and anger and bitterness, on anything petty. That was the secret: remembering your dying time, in order to keep the stupid and the ugly out of your living time.
To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.
There may be a hundred thousand men in an army, who are all equally free; but they only are naturally most fit to be commanders or leaders, who most excel in the virtues required for the right performance of those offices.
I would say the most help I got was from my dad. My dad is a civil engineer in Switzerland; he's 90 years old now, so he's no longer active as a civil engineer, but still a very active person.
Historically in every recovery, because the president rightly did inherit a recession. But historically, the lagging indicator always deals with employment.