Mike Massimino Quotes

The camaraderie that firefighters have, that brotherhood that forms among them - my father was a part of that, and it came from having a shared sense of purpose. He told me that whatever you do in life, it can't just be about making money. It's important that you work to make the world a better place, that you help improve the lives of the people around you.

It's a planet," I said. "It's not what we thought it was back home. It's not this safe cocoon, man. We're out here spinning in all this chaos. The Earth is a planet. The Earth is a spaceship, and we're all space travelers.

That night Newman and I prepped for our space walk. One of the things you do is put anti-fog on your visor. It's Joy soap, actually, the kind you buy at the supermarket; it just happens to work well as an anti-fog solution in space suits. Joy stopped making this particular kind, so NASA bought up a lifetime supply, basically every bottle available in the world. You

And my thought looking down at the Earth was Wow. How much God our Father must love us that he gave us this home. He didn't put us on Mars or Venus with nothing but rocks and frozen waste. He gave us paradise and said, "Live here." It's not easy to wrap your head around the origins and purpose of the universe, but that's the best way I can describe the feelings I had.

You only have one life. You have to spend it doing something that matters.

Kennedy's address announcing the Apollo program was one of the great presidential speeches of all time. He challenged us. He excited us. We reach for impossible things, he said, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." He

If you can learn to live with indignities in life, you can go far." And he's right. You can learn a lot by getting knocked down, and I got knocked down over and over again. And every time I got up and kept going. I know there were students in my class who were smarter than me, but I don't know if there was anybody who worked harder than me.

That's how a team works. You help the people around you, and everybody's better off for it. The crazy thing is that most of those guys wanted to be astronauts, too, but they never saw it as a competition. We were on the same team, where you want everyone around you to be as successful as possible, because in some way or another their success will become your success. It's good karma - what goes around comes around.

If you work hard and get help from good friends, together you can overcome almost any challenge, no matter how great.

Life is funny. I'd applied to the wrong graduate program, but that eventually led me to the right grad program. I'd taken what I thought was the wrong undergraduate major, and that was the thing that set me apart and allowed me to find my niche. I don't know if there are any lessons to take from that except to realize that the things you think are mistakes may turn out not to be mistakes. I realized wherever you are, if you make the most of what you've got, you can find a way to keep moving forward.

Because being the right person isn't about being perfect; it's about being able to handle whatever life throws at you. I

I think he was trying to tell us that life is not about achieving one great thing, because once that thing is over, life keeps going. What motivates you then? The important thing is having a passion, something you love doing, and the greatest joy in the world is that you get to wake up every day and do it.

I realized much later in life that the reason this decision between MIT and IBM was so agonizing was because it wasn't really about choosing a career; it was about deciding who I was, which part of myself I wanted to be, and that's the hardest decision any of us has to make.

Popping M&M's in the air and going after them and chomping them like Pac-Man. I actually gained weight in space, which no one ever does. The doctors were confounded, but I just loved eating up there.