Agona Apell, The Success Genome Unravelled: Turning Men from Rot to Rock

"The eternal struggle between failure and fortune is a fight not between mortal enemies but sparring partners. So fortune is improved by failure, and the reverse is also true."

"The quality of a conqueror is to be judged as much by what he spears as by what he spares"

"Men who attain great heights always have few friends but many admirers, while those who ply the lower reaches of fortune often have many friends but scarcely an admirer in sight"

"I rebuke societies that impart to their flowers their cold and rigid demeanour. Flowers should not stand with the stiffness of a soldier on parade but must carry themselves with the relaxedness of a dancer, their arms outstretched above a shaggy mane. Life reveals few sights as distressing as the look of flowers standing mournfully at attention unstirred by the kisses of a million bees. This infection of uncomely reserve is the handiwork of sombre gardeners bred in sombre societies who will not consider their work done till their flowers exude in aspect that stiffness they esteem. They forget that God intended that we mingle with flowers and not merely admire them from afar. But there is a look in a fastidiously manicured garden that makes me keep my distance, a look that draws my eyes but scorns my touch, and that is why I condemn them."

"In the world of oratory, the cunning atheist declares himself a believer so as to preserve access to the rich fund of tales from religious texts and to powerful concepts like God, fate, angels, the soul, & the afterlife."

"A book is the only true land of the free: within its borders, anything is possible"

"There are things to be obtained by law and things to be obtained by claw"

"The manager needs only a molehill to build a mountain, but the money-ger needs a full mountain to build another."

"A struggle is fatally injured not so much by the stumbles of its leaders as by their mumbles"

"Gender equality remains meaningless until we consider it to mean that femininity and masculinity, when we consider the full scope of capabilities that they each afford humanity, are of equal value to society. Therefore, women who attempt to act out equality while suppressing their femininity do not prove equality but only the advantage of masculinity."

"The low suffer most the blow of the law"

"The further from law you move, the closer to claw you come."

"The highest form of worship is to answer God's prayer."

"While reason steers a man, it is faith alone that moves him"

"People of great faith are almost always lacking in reason, while people possessed of great reason often suffer from a pitiful lack of faith. So it always happens that people of great faith can move the world but cannot steer it, while people possessed of great reason excel at steering the world but are hopeless at moving it"

"The poet drafts his work as a writer but edits it as a sculptor, with his pen as a chisel and his mind a hammer."

"The true worth of a man is not seen in the value his money gives him but in the value he gives his money by the uses he puts it to"

"Friends are won through personal contact, but admirers are won through their contact with our works"

"To the aimless man all men are equal, but to him with purpose some men are seed and others weed"

"The rich don't know when they will die, but the world's poor don't know when they will live"