One of my most memorable Thanksgiving memories was probably the first year that me and my two brothers decided to start our annual eating contest. We ate throughout the whole day. We started that morning and weighed ourselves, and at the very end of the night, we weighed ourselves out. And all three of us equally gained five pounds.

I think that is a better thing than thanksgiving: thanks-living. How is this to be done? By a general cheerfulness of manner, by an obedience to the command of Him by whose mercy we live, by a perpetual, constant delighting of ourselves in the Lord, and by a submission of our desires to His will.

As an entrepreneur and on behalf of the company's management, I am thankful to have been given the opportunity to rededicate ourselves to the company's mission of building the world's most loved hospitality brand that is focused on bringing a better lifestyle for the common man.

Technology may create a condition, but the questions are what do we do about ourselves. We better understand ourselves pretty clearly and we better find ways to like ourselves.

As technology evolves, it manipulates our culture, and there's a huge opportunity to push ourselves further. I think it actually makes ourselves maybe more human, or at least human in a different way, that we can connect together in amazingly different ways and powerful new ways.

Our technology, our machines, is part of our humanity. We created them to extend ourselves, and that is what is unique about human beings.

Some of the most innocuous inventions have proven earth-shattering, with reverberations felt around the planet. The Internet is the poster child for disruptive technology, but even such inventions as Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPod have rocked their respective industries by changing how we entertain ourselves.

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.

None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody - a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns - bent down and helped us pick up our boots.

Sympathy is one of the principles most widely rooted in our nature: we rejoice to see ourselves reflected in another; and, perversely enough, we sometimes have a secret pleasure in seeing the sin which dwells in ourselves existing under a deformed and monstrous aspect in another.

In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.

Our success educationally, industrially and politically is based upon the protection of a nation founded by ourselves. And the nation can be nowhere else but in Africa.

Our limitations and success will be based, most often, on your own expectations for ourselves. What the mind dwells upon, the body acts upon.

The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.

We deceive ourselves when we fancy that only weakness needs support. Strength needs it far more.

Endurance, after all, is the only reason we even exist. We think of ourselves as nature's deadliest animals, but the truth is, a naked human is the biggest wimp in the wild. We have no fangs, no claws, no strength, and no speed.

Death used to announce itself in the thick of life but now people drag on so long it sometimes seems that we are reaching the stage when we may have to announce ourselves to death. It is as though one needs a special strength to die, and not a final weakness.

Even as we enumerate their shortcomings, the rigor of raising children ourselves makes clear to us our mothers' incredible strength. We fear both. If they are not strong, who will protect us? If they are not imperfect, how can we equal them?

When we have nothing to cling to as our own and cease thinking of ourselves as people who must defend privileges, we can open ourselves freely to others with the faithful expectation that our strength will manifest itself in our shared weakness.

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.

The first thing I learned in boxing is to not get hit. That's the art of boxing. Execute your opponent without getting hit. In sports school, we were putting our hands behind our backs and having to defend ourselves with our shoulders, by rolling, by moving round the ring, moving out feet.

If we confound and break up the proposed unfolding the world impresses upon us, we can give ourselves the space to consider what we want to be as a species.

There are a lot of things you can do in space, and space essentially is unlimited resources. We are climbing over ourselves here looking for the next source of energy. The universe has an unlimited source of energy.