The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

So your experiences give you special insight that today’s leaders need. If you tap into that experience, it should endow you with empathy – the understanding of what it’s like to walk in somebody else’s shoes. It should give you an ability to connect. It should give you a sense of what it means to overcome barriers.

Whatever success I achieved, whatever positions of leadership I’ve held, have depended less on Ivy League degrees or SAT scores or GPAs, and have instead been due to that sense of empathy and connection — the special obligation I felt, as a black man like you, to help those who needed it most; people who did not have the opportunities that I had, because but for the grace of God, I might be in their shoes. So it’s up to you to widen your circle of your concern — to create greater justice both in your own community, but also across our country. To make sure everyone has a voice; everyone gets a seat at the table; to make sure that everyone — no matter what they look like or where they come from, or who they love — gets a chance to walk through those doors of opportunity if they want it bad enough.

Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.

Reality is above all else a variable and nobody is qualified to say that he or she knows exactly what it is. As a matter of fact, with a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.

Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.

Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.

We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.

What you focus on expands, and when you focus on the goodness in your life, you create more of it. Opportunities, relationships, even money flowed my way when I learned to be grateful no matter what happened in my life.

The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to ‘create’ rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting.

God is present everywhere. The act of making art is a direct path to contact with God, and we do not need to travel any geographic or psychic distance to experience the grace of creation in the grace of our own creating. Goethe told us, "Whatever you think you can do, or believe you can do, begin it, because action has magic, grace and power in it." This was no mere bromide. It was a report on spiritual experience — an experience that each of us can have whenever we surrender to being a beginner, whenever we dismantle our adult's aloof avoidance and actively seek the Great Creator's hand by reaching out our own to start anew.

Living with integrity means:

* Not settling for less than what you know you deserve in your relationships.
* Asking for what you want and need from others.
* Speaking your truth, even though it might create conflict or tension.
* Behaving in ways that are in harmony with your personal values.
* Making choices based on what you believe, and not what others believe.

Healings is a somewhat automatic by-product of self-expression, not a goal per se. This fact can confuse some people — particularly therapists, who want to "understand" the workings of a process that is both mysterious and spiritual. Intellectually, many doctors and therapists do know that something heals beyond their own skill, but understandably, they want to know what that something is, and control it as part of the healing process that they can administer like a good medicine. Therapy and creative recovery are mutually exclusive, but they do functionally differently and come out of two very different sets of assumptions. Humans are complex, creative beings, and when we create something that expresses our own complexity, we arrive at an inner distillate of clarity through our own creative inner process.

Each choice we make causes a ripple effect in our lives. When things happen to us, it is the reaction we choose that can create the difference between the sorrows of our past and the joy in our future.

In a time of destruction, create something.

I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's.