Carlos

“Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence — the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes — all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.”
― Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

“Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in the world. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“You either commit yourself as a professional racing driver that's designed to win races or you come second or you come third or fifth and am not design to come third, fourth or fifth, I race to win.”
― Ayrton Senna

“Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something is taken.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and Other Essays