“I learned from working around the working man, ... I worked around people who had a hard time. A whole lot of my inspiration just came off of growing up around a small town and the things we did. I used to talk a lot with my grandparents about those things. I read lots of books. Every little thing came across as inspiring.”

“Only, we think that not dozens, but as a minimum, hundreds of people should be on that [travel ban] list. Why? It [should include] judges whose rulings are politically motivated, heads of universities who expel students for their political views, militia officers who beat people, and all those propaganda-mongers who are destroying freedom of thought in society. We do not have TV. We have a propaganda organ.”

“We have a lot of smart, experienced players on our team and they know how to prepare for each game. They know that if we slow down a little and get in a lull, it is hard to get out of it. It is a long season and we just have to keep working hard and getting results. I know everyone here is motivated to keep playing well and hopefully we can close out the season well.”

In the sphere of human relations, faith is an indispensable quality of any significant friendship or love. "Having faith" in another person means to be certain of the reliability and unchangeability of his fundamental attitudes, of the core of his personality, of his love. By this I do not mean that a person may not change his opinions, but that his basic motivations remain the same; that, for instance, his respect for life and human dignity is part of himself, not subject to change.

Constantly stopping to explain oneself may expand into a frustrating burden for the rare individual, so ceasing to do so is like finally dropping the weights and sprinting towards his goals. Those who insincerely misunderstand, who intentionally distort the motives of a pure-intentioned individual, then, no longer have the opportunity to block his path; instead, they are the ones left to stand on the sidelines shouting frustratedly in the wind of his trail.

When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures.

...the naive forms of Christian moral motivation - bare threats of hell and the bribery of heaven - stunt moral growth by ensuring believers remain emotional children, never achieving the cognitive moral development of adults. Psychologists have established that mature adults are moral not because of bare threats and bribes (that stage of moral development typifies children, not adults), but because they care about the effects their behavior has on themselves and others.

“We find that people's beliefs about their efficacy affect the sorts of choices they make in very significant ways. In particular, it affects their levels of motivation and perseverance in the face of obstacles. Most success requires persistent effort, so low self-efficacy becomes a self-limiting process. In order to succeed, people need a sense of self-efficacy, strung together with resilience to meet the inevitable obstacles and inequities of life.”

“I've seen changes in our teachers and in their motivation, through more relevant lesson plans, assessments that are more authentic, projects that are more real-world based ... more than at any other time. Students are performing at a higher level than ever before. It's new, it's working. It's goal-driven and career-based. Today's schools are becoming more like an adult learning environment.”

While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.