People who love themselves, don’t hurt other people. The more we hate ourselves, the more we want others to suffer.
Children are gifts. They are not ours for the breaking. They are ours for the making.
Dads. Do your faces light up when you first see your child in the morning or when you come home from work? Do you not understand that a child’s entire sense of value can revolve around what they see in your face when you first see them?
Loving my son, building my son, touching my son, playing with my son, being with my son… these aren’t tasks that only super dads can perform. These are tasks that every dad should perform. Always. Without fail.
Saturday mornings, I’ve learned, are a great opportunity for kids to sneak into your bed, fall back asleep, and kick you in the face.
It’s time we stand up and demand more of the fathers of this world. It’s time we stop buying into their rationalizations and their sorry explanations. It’s time we give our kids a fighting chance.
Sometimes to be a good parent… You have to laugh when you want to be angry. You have to be angry when you want to laugh. And that is why good parenting is tough.
Parenting is the greatest pay it forward system on earth. We don’t owe our parents anything. We owe our children everything. The same was true for our parents. The same will be true for our children.
Fishing is much less about the fishing, and much more about the time alone with your kid, away from the hustle and bustle of the everyday.
If you want to change the world, first change yourself, then tell others how you did it. Never demand that people change. Inspire them to change using your own change as an example instead.
I really believe that it is honesty about our imperfect selves that makes everyone do better and be better.
Once your past no longer has the power to define you, your future is, quite literally, yours for the taking. Every single beautiful thing you could possibly want or imagine will be yours.
Having a college degree does not make you educated. Always learning new things is what makes you educated.
Our greatest mistakes, if we look at them, and digest them, and interact with them, and learn from them… they can be the greatest moments of our lives.
Only those willing to truly risk everything will gain everything. No person ever rose to greatness without the willingness to lose it all.
One of the greatest acts of service you can do is to find someone who is secretly lonely and be a friend to them, if only for a day.
Who do you want to surround yourself with? People who can pull you up to their level of greatness? Or people who will happily pull you down to theirs?
You’d be hard-pressed to find an old person who would trade in a true friend for any amount of popularity or fame. You’d also be hard-pressed to find a young person who wouldn’t.
If bullies actually believe that somebody loves them and believes in them, they will love themselves, they will become better people, and many will even become saviors to the bullied.
As much as I don’t want it to be true, the reasons I don’t do something define me as a person even more so, perhaps, than the reasons I do something.
Mirrors have three purposes. To show you who you are. To show you who you were. And to show you who you want to be.
Happiness comes from striving to make tomorrow better than today and being at peace when yesterday was better than today as well.
If you don’t want your past to own you, try owning your past.
The goal was never dependent on the route that took me there. It was always dependent on the heart that got me through whatever route opened itself up to my efforts.
If your dreams and goals get derailed, they’re not dead. Derailed simply means off-track. Pick ’em up and put ’em back on again.
I’m not going to miss 95% of life to weigh 5% less.
The skinnier and more toned I got, the fatter I felt.The more in shape I got, the more out of shape I felt like I was.And the more I made myself look good to the masses, the less attractive I felt like I was.
Be real. Embrace that you have weakness. Because everyone does. Embrace that your body is not perfect. Because nobody’s is. Embrace that you have things you can’t control. We all have a list of them.
So you were talking crap about me? Hm. I missed it. I was too busy being fabulous.
When someone points out your past mistakes, look at them dead in the eyes and follow with, ‘and I’d do it all again to have the life I have now.
A lot of people don’t like me. I take that as evidence that I have done something beautifully different or something extraordinary.
If only I could change the world around me, perhaps my truth won’t one day be the end of me.
You want to be popular? It’s easy to do. Just be a total weirdo and love yourself for it.
We all have to escape from this thing called life sometimes. Maybe we use substances to do it. Maybe we use religion. Maybe we use exercise. Maybe we use anger. But we all have to do it. *How* we do it is what defines us.
Those who truly want greatness must surround themselves with people even greater than they are.
Most rules are made by people with no authority who want to control and limit you from reaching your true potential. Ignore them, break their rules, and wave at them as you soar past them to greatness.
One of life’s ironies is that the more honest and vulnerable you are, the more others try to discredit you as a fraud and a fake. Shut them up by not caring.
Who I am is not the same minute to minute or day to day. There are far too many variables for that to ever be true, for me, or for anyone.
Improvement is always on the schedule for tomorrow. Change is always taking place some time in the future. It’s human nature.
I will never have greater respect than for the man that realizes he was wrong and graciously admits it without a single excuse.
Find a way to change your attitude for the better and your life will change for the better with little effort from you.
I will one day accept death with gratitude if I meet it having lived a life that became truly my own.
Sometimes we need to look at everything going wrong in our lives and admit to ourselves, “I am the only common denominator here.
My entire life, I’ve never been able to understand the concept of not being happy or excited when others were successful or had something good happen to them. It quite honestly is a concept that I cannot grasp.
The most difficult part of dating as a single parent is deciding how much risk your own child’s heart is worth.
I am not where I am because of luck. I am where I am because I took risks others weren’t willing to take. The world rewards the risk takers. It always has. It always will.
Don’t be mad at me for my success. Be mad at yourself for not doing what it takes to get what I have. Then do something amazing with that emotion.
Certain girls deserve lots of flowers. You are one of them.
Death is most terrifying to those who have yet to live.
Life and love are not about what you know, but about what you know you don’t know.
One of the greatest tragedies I can think of is for a person to die having never fully questioned the life he was born into.
Every success and failure of any relationship is two-sided. No matter how thin, the pancake always has two sides. Yes, I blew my marriages. And so did they.
I’m not saying you are jealous or insecure. I’m just saying that you obsessing over another person’s accomplishments makes you look that way.
When one says, I won’t judge you for that, what they’re really saying is, I am judging you for that. Think about it. If you walk into my house and I tell you, “I won’t judge you for wearing those pants,” what am I really saying?
There are too many people who love me, and accept me, and never try and change me, and who don’t condemn me in the slightest, for me to waste even one moment of my life anymore worrying about what other people will think.
So many people hate me and love me for the exact same reasons. This is all the proof I need that my opinion about myself is the only opinion I should ever care about.
Don’t judge me for escaping the stresses and cruelty of the world differently than you do.
I have learned that trying to control other people’s opinions of you is the fastest possible route to unhappiness.
Nobody on Earth can tell you how you should live your life. Nobody with any real authority anyway.
I do not see the point in dressing and acting and speaking in a way that makes you feel more comfortable and me feel less comfortable.
Be a little less obsessed with how I live my life and a little more obsessed with how you live your own.
What haunts me far more than anything I’ve ever done are the things I haven’t done.