A quote from Robin Williams

'I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate.'

-Comedian George Burns (1896-1996)

A Quote by Sandra Day O'Connor

"Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time."

A quote by Magic Johnson

"Celebrate the life you had, not the life you could've had."

'Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.'

- Inventor Thomas Edison (1847 - 1931)

A quote by Roger Federer

"There is no way around hard work. Embrace it."

'In my experience, each failure contains the seeds of your next success—if you are willing to learn from it.'

- Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen (1953–2018)

A quote by award-winning actor Tom Hanks

"We are still in the position of waking up and having a choice. Do I make the world better today somehow, or do I not bother?"

A quote from Mark Cuban

"Talent without effort is wasted talent. And while effort is the one thing you can control in your life, applying that effort intelligently is next on the list."

A quote by Lucille Ball

"Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world."

A quote by athlete Walter Payton

"When you're good at something, you'll tell everyone. When you're great at something, they'll tell you."

A quote by Howard Hughes

"Do the impossible, because almost everyone has told me my ideas are merely fantasies."

A quote from sports journalist Stuart Scott

"In football, as in life, the hits you don’t see coming are the ones that do the most damage."

'You will never feel proud of your work if you find no joy within it; your best work is always joyful work.'

- Stevie Wonder (1950-present)

A quote from Van Gogh

"Find things beautiful as much as you can, most people find too little beautiful."

'Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.'

- 1946 film "It's a Wonderful Life"

'Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.'

- Harper Lee from "To Kill a Mockingbird"

'I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse.'

- Modern nursing innovator Florence Nightingale (1820-1910)

'Sometimes the biggest problem is in your head. You’ve got to believe you can play a shot instead of wondering where your next bad shot is coming from.'

- Golf great Jack Nicklaus (1940-present)

A failed resolution still defines directional exploration

The new year practice of making resolutions is so popular it can often inspire ironic dismissal from those all-too-aware of how many fail. This piece argues failure doesn't matter: Making the resolution itself helps define one's focus in life, arguably more important than racking up achievements.

'Until you're ready to look foolish, you'll never have the possibility of being great.'

- Cherilyn "Cher" Sarkisian (1946-present)

A quote by Herman Melville

"Whoever is not in the possession of leisure can hardly be said to possess independence."

'Mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it'

- Graham Cooke

'You only go around once, but if you play your cards right, once is enough.'

- Frank Sinatra (1915–1998)

'In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.'

-Poet Robert Frost (1874-1963)

'The minute you start talking about what you're going to do if you lose, you have lost.'

- Diplomat George Shultz (1920–2021)

SpongeBob exemplifies Aristotle's philosophy for living well because he understands that happiness doesn't come from external factors like money, recognition, or power.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

After NASA's Voyager 1 captured Earth as a single pixel as it left the solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan used the image to reflect on humanity's fragility and the responsibility to protect 'the only world we've ever known.'

Before writing 'Walden,' transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with a campfire that grew out of control.

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

Brandi Chastain, the star of the 1999 US victory over China in the 1999 Women's World Cup, was a last-second choice to take the penalty kick that sealed the victory.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

For centuries, Niagara Falls has been a magnet for daredevils seeking to conquer one of nature's most powerful wonders, with its 200-foot drop and water rushing at 32 feet per second with 280 tons of force.

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

See a ranking of the best (and worst) Federal Reserve Chairs since 1914 out of the 16 men and women who have held the office since.

American short story writer Flannery O'Connor raised 40 peacocks, which became potent symbols for her fiction's elegant violence

Art theft is the third-largest source of criminal revenues worldwide, thanks in part to the subjective nature of valuing a work of art.

Up to a million Girl Scouts sell about 200 million cookie boxes every spring, generating $800 million, largely because refusing a child is frowned upon

Indefinite cloning of some endangered species may not sustain their longevity because cloning success rates decrease as genetic mutations accumulate.

Watch how algorithms can be designed to train themselves and self-improve without human input, to the point where the optimized code is too complex for programmers to understand.

The Beatles' US label rejected the band's first two singles, 'Please Please Me' and 'From Me to You,' with one executive calling the band 'dead in the water.'

Comedy legend Catherine O'Hara, star of 'Schitt's Creek' and 'Home Alone,' quit 'Saturday Night Live' after just one week to return to her old job.

Explore a list of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by some of the world's best living writers, including Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and Jennifer Egan.

The first robot in literature may have been a 'mechanical man' in 1907's 'Ozma of Oz,' a book in L Frank Baum's 'Wizard of Oz' series.

A small portion of The Winstons' 'Amen, Brother,' an obscure '60s gospel record, is the basis for thousands of hip-hop tracks, making it one of the most sampled records ever that's informally known as 'the Amen break.'

Doctors differentiate between a phobia and fear by asking patients whether their fear interferes with their day-to-day activities.

The American Society of Civil Engineers' infrastructure report card gave the US a C in 2025, its highest grade since the project launched in 1998.

In 1945, Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and legendary animator Walt Disney began collaborating on a short film that was not completed until 2003, years after both men had died.

NBA superstar Victor Wembanyama spent the 2025 summer training with monks in central China to enhance his body and mind.