People say you have to hit rock bottom, and, I can tell you, almost dying is as rock bottom as it gets.

I never knew a more presumptuous person than myself. The fact that I say that shows that what I say is true.

If we are to be happy, we must first react against our tendency to follow the line of least resistance, a tendency that causes us either to remain as we are, or to look primarily to activities external to ourselves for what will provide new impetus to our lives.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

Don’t ever criticize yourself. Don’t go around all day long thinking, ‚I’m unattractive, I’m slow, I’m not as smart as my brother.‘ God wasn’t having a bad day when he made you… If you don’t love yourself in the right way, you can’t love your neighbour. You can’t be as good as you are supposed to be.

I am not a particularly thick-skinned person.

Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.

I know that I’m not the easiest person to live with. The challenge I put on myself is so great that the person I live with feels himself challenged. I bring a lot to bear, and I don’t know how not to.

Live the life you’ve dreamed.

I believe that God has put gifts and talents and ability on the inside of every one of us. When you develop that and you believe in yourself and you believe that you’re a person of influence and a person of purpose, I believe you can rise up out of any situation.

You have to be smart. The easy days are over.

You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.

My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.

Because you know when you first become famous, you start walking a little different because people are staring at you.

There are alway going to be bad things. But you can write it down and make a song out of it.

I had never been in charge of anything. I’d always worked for someone. I worked for a furniture warehouse. I did masonry. I always had a boss yelling at me. So I’d never been in charge of an organization.

Solitary trees, if they grow at all, grow strong.

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

If we’re really honest with ourselves, most of us will admit that we want to impress people, and this is what’s causing us to do what we do.

It is better to do one’s own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins.

Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It’s rage, it’s creativity, it’s pain, it’s hurt, but it’s the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music.

The man who has done his level best… is a success, even though the world may write him down a failure.

I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.

I’ve been running a full marathon every year for more than 20 years, and my record is getting worse. Getting older, getting worse. It’s natural.

I think beating myself up sometimes and knowing I am not happy when I do it makes me work harder to do a good job.

I was so rude when I was a little girl.

Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.

Lots of songs aren’t even from my experiences, but they’re about accepting… the dark things about yourself.

I’ve discovered that when we take time to renew our minds with God’s Word, we learn how to think like God thinks, say what God says, and act like He wants us to act.

You may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me like a trifle, but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work, I had earned a dollar. I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time.

Make bold choices and make mistakes. It’s all those things that add up to the person you become.

I let people fill in the blanks on their own. If they want to think about their ex, that’s fine. If they want to think about maybe who one of my exes is, then that’s fine. And it might not be right, because I’m the only one who knows what these songs are really about. It’s the one shred of privacy I have in the matter.

I am getting to the point where the only love worth being in is the love worth singing about.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Life opens up opportunities to you, and you either take them or you stay afraid of taking them.

Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth… That’s the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.

Although the circumstances of our lives may seem very disengaged, with me standing here as the First Lady of the United States of America and you just getting through school, I want you to know we have very much in common. For nothing in my life ever would have predicted that I would be standing here as the first African-American First Lady.

When I grew up, the Devil was a reason why I had a headache or the Devil was the reason I got mad today. We always blamed the Devil. I think today when I say the Enemy, I like to make it broader. Sometimes the Enemy can be our own thoughts.

My fans saw me get engaged, saw me make that woman my wife, me having kids, me divorcing, me talking about divorce before the divorce, me talking about my kids‘ reaction to that divorce.

Hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible.

It’s getting harder to make decisions to just want to do something to work… I’m trying to find things that are extremely challenging or mean something to me deeply.

We’re all insecure, aren’t we? I’m not walking around like I’m macho man or anything.

I mean we all need a second chance sometimes.

I don’t think I’m tangible to myself.

I try to teach my heart not to want things it can’t have.

I went through every emotion with tryna pursue what I’m doing, you know what I mean? And I think what’s gon‘ separate whoever’s gon go for something, that you ain’t gon‘ quit.

Love always ends differently and it always begins differently – especially with me.

The people of Northern Ireland have sorted out my whole life.

The one thing that I keep learning over and over again is that I don’t know nothing. I mean, that’s my life lesson.

I had my moments of being humiliated, and then I had moments of doing something humiliating. I’m glad I lived out both roles.

I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.

It seems the older you get, the more life comes into focus.

Hair is about when you’re younger. I am my hair.

I always entertain the notion that I’m wrong, or that I’ll have to revise my opinion. Most of the time that feels good; sometimes it really hurts and is embarrassing.

The work is the work. The work is not me.

There’s many ups and downs in the fight game.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

I’ve done many ads because that’s my new career. It’s an inspiring extension for my mind.

Your Highest Self is not just an idea that sounds lofty and spiritual. It is a way of being. It is the very first principle that you must come to understand and embrace as you move toward attracting to you that which you want and need for this parenthesis in eternity that you know as your life.

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

I think I have always had a little humor.