Slow down and make building relationships as important as building projects.

When you take the time to actually listen, with humility, to what people have to say, it's amazing what you can learn. Especially if the people who are doing the talking also happen to be children.

If you teach a boy, you educate an individual; but if you teach a girl, you educate a community.

If you really want to change a culture to empower women improve basic hygiene and health care and fight high rates of infant mortality the answer is to educate girls.

My father ended up starting the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre, which is on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. My mother started a school.

In times of war, you often hear leaders—Christian, Jewish, and Muslim—saying, ‘God is on our side.’ But that isn’t true. In war, God is on the side of refugees, widows, and orphans.

If you really want to change a culture... empower women.

You can hand out condoms, drop bombs, build roads, or put in electricity, but until the girls are educated a society won’t change.

When your kids accomplish something it means much more than anything you've done.

Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel.' Sign in Skardu

The tune was too ingrained for Mortenson to consider the novelty of this moment- an American, lost in Pakistan, singing a German hymn in Swahili.

Going to the woods is going home.

A wise walker will set out early, keeping an open mind on how far to travel, allowing each day's adventure to evolve.

Contrary to his infallibly "honest" image, Abe wasn't above lying so long as it served a noble purpose.

Men are the devils of the earth, and the animals are its tormented souls.

You are so near to my thoughts and my heart yet so far from my body and my arms... I once loved the whole world because you were in it.

I feel like the universe is so big it'd be foolish to pull out the "no" for it.

If you don't get it right with your first family, you can always do it again with another.

When you have no idea how to surrender and you're tied up in knots, JUST BREATHE!

Comedy's easy for me now - it's all about timing and the way you deliver lines. I use facial expressions to get the point across.

Indigenous people have discovered that Christianity is not inherently Western but universal - 'translatable' into any cultural idiom.