Many people think of perfectionism as striving to be your best, but it is not about self-improvement; it’s about earning approval and acceptance.

The reason that I’m here at all is because of my relationship with my family and their encouragement of me to be a musician and to work hard. As long as I stay there in that space, I can do anything. That’s my truth.

I have met 18 million youth, and each wants to be unique.

What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.

Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do.

I focus on my own job.

Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, ‚Oh, I forgot that bit,‘ then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you’ve figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

It definitely has learning a lesson about the way you’re living your life. I wouldn’t compare our movie to that, but it has a structure where it’s about a man who doesn’t appreciate all that he has and finds out at the end that life has been great and he has to enjoy that.

I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.

When I was four, my mother insisted I get out of the car and find my own way home. Although I got lost, I did find my way home. It taught me the value of independence at an early age.

I’m not very articulate.

One of the wonderful things about Oprah: She teaches you to keep on stepping.

I used to let other people’s struggles affect my happiness. If they weren’t happy, there was no way I was going to be happy. The opposite was also true: If I wasn’t happy, I didn’t want anyone around me to be happy.

If you get your ego in your way, you will only look to other people and circumstances to blame.

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

O wretched man, wretched not just because of what you are, but also because you do not know how wretched you are!

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.

A wise man should consider that health is the greatest of human blessings, and learn how by his own thought to derive benefit from his illnesses.

Little things affect little minds.

I’m gonna make what I want to make, and other people are gonna like what they’re gonna like. It doesn’t really matter.

In past generations, people would try to play younger than they really are. My trick is, I don’t try to play younger than I really am.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

We learn martial arts as helping weakness. You never fight for people to get hurt. You’re always helping people.

I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.

I was never particularly fond of my voice.

Mine is better than ours.

I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.

Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

I’m like a recovering perfectionist. For me it’s one day at a time.

I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized, and I still had a daughter who I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

We are in a wrong state of mind if we are not in a thankful state of mind.

It is our choices… that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.

Anything you put your mind to and add your imagination into can make your life a lot better and a lot more fun.

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library.

If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.

First ask yourself: What is the worst that can happen? Then prepare to accept it. Then proceed to improve on the worst.

Fear is stupid. So are regrets.

Failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.

Arthur Miller wouldn’t have married me if I had been nothing but a dumb blonde.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure.

The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.

Once you’ve grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you’ve inherited, you don’t even notice it any longer.

I’m not looking to exclude people, I’m looking to include them.

Check your ego at the door. The ego can be the great success inhibitor. It can kill opportunities, and it can kill success.

The best part about being in your thirties is you know what works for you.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

I don’t have the best track record with quotes.

Teach me to feel another’s woe, to hide the fault I see, that mercy I to others show, that mercy show to me.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

I’ve learned not to look at reviews. Early on, I did. I was always curious.

I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.

Forward, as occasion offers. Never look round to see whether any shall note it… Be satisfied with success in even the smallest matter, and think that even such a result is no trifle.