When I recall my own path of life I cannot but speak of the violence, hatred and lies. A lesson drawn from such experiences, however, was that we can effectively oppose violence only if we ourselves do not resort to it.
What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore?
Life doesn't offer you the perfect opportunity at the perfect time. Opportunities come when you least expect them ... Rarely are opportunities presented to you in a perfect way. In a nice little box with a yellow bow on top. ‘Here, open it, it's perfect. You'll love it.’ Opportunities -- the good ones -- are messy, confusing and hard to recognize. They're risky. They challenge you.
Johns Hopkins University Commencement, Class of 2014, HuffPost, May 2014 source ↗
Others on this question
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Lech Wałęsa
President of Poland, 1990–1995; co-founder and chairman of the Solidarity trade union
Recorded
Oslo City Hall (lecture read on his behalf by Bogdan Cywiński), The Nobel Foundation, 11 December 1983
source ↗
Siya Kolisi
South Africa international rugby union flanker and captain
I think I wouldn't have made it if I didn't go through those struggles but that still doesn't make it right for kids to have to go through the past that I went through.
Jenny Diski
Novelist and essayist
One thing I state as soon as we’re out of the door: ‘Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer. Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing.’ I will not personify the cancer cells inside me in any form. I reject all metaphors of attack or enmity in the midst, and will have nothing whatever to do with any notion of desert, punishment, fairness or unfairness, or any kind of moral causality.
Eliud Kipchoge
Kenyan marathon runner
Only the disciplined ones are free in life. If you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your moods. You are a slave to your passions.
Recorded
Address at the Oxford Union Society, November 2017, Outside, 10 February 2018
source ↗
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