No matter how you were taught by your teacher about how to recite a poem, it is impossible to wear your teacher's smiling face to the stage. You got to put on that smile.

The question is not "can you wear your father's shoes?". The question is "can you walk in your father's shoes?". It is one thing having a mentor and it is another thing to become like your mentor.

I saw [Linus Pauling] as a brilliant lecturer and a man with a fantastic memory, and a great, great showman. I think he was the century’s greatest chemist. No doubt about it.

The best university in the world is neither Oxford nor Harvard. The best university is "youniversity". YOU got the lecture halls of thoughts in YOU! You got everything you need to graduate with first class accomplishments put in you! YOU can do it!

If you wait to live you will never succeed. Living begins today and it begins within you.

He's seen me at my stray dog lowest and still he stood behind me, did everything he could to help me. He saw the future I could have before I even wanted it for myself, and he was the one to push me towards it. That's faith. Growing up, I thought faith was about believing Jesus died for us and that if I held on to that, I'd get to meet him when I died too. But faith doesn't mean that to me anymore. Now it means someone seeing something in you that you've never seen in yourself, and not giving up until you see it too. I want that. I miss that.

Running overtime is the one unforgivable error a lecturer can make. After fifty minutes (one microcentury as von Neumann used to say) everybody's attention will turn elsewhere.