Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.

We can’t have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta have middle class families up in front. We don’t mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.

The superior man acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his action.

I’m not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself – then they get to say ‚See, you did it yourself.‘

Nobody can tell me where I can and can’t go.

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.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

There are three methods to gaining wisdom. The first is reflection, which is the highest. The second is limitation, which is the easiest. The third is experience, which is the bitterest.

The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while.

I’m not one icon. I’m every icon. I’m an icon that is made out of all the colors on the palette at every time. I have no restrictions. No restrictions.

I don’t concern myself with award. I’d been to the party enough times to know it really didn’t matter.

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

Find what’s hot, find what’s just opened and then look for the worst review of the week. There is so much to learn from watching a restaurant getting absolutely panned and having a bad experience. Go and see it for yourself.

Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.

Here is the rule to remember in the future, When anything tempts you to be bitter: not, ‚This is a misfortune‘ but ‚To bear this worthily is good fortune.‘

I don’t see the wisdom in modern politicians that I once saw in men like Dean Acheson, David Bruce, or George Marshall. In my day, the northeastern establishment dominated foreign policy formulation, but the composition and distribution of our population is very different today.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

The little man is still a man.

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.

I think women want to take care of themselves, and I think having a voice in how that is done is very important.

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.

A man watches his pear tree day after day, impatient for the ripening of the fruit. Let him attempt to force the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait, and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap.

He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other.

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

It is not well to make great changes in old age.

In 1969, I gave up women and alcohol – it was the worst 20 minutes of my life.

Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.

My mother never made me do anything for my brothers, like serve them. I think that’s an important lesson, especially for the Latino culture, because the women are expected to be the ones that serve and cook and whatever. Not in our family. Everybody was equal.

You’re just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You’ve got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate.

The real truths of life are never entirely new to you or to anybody because there is a level deep down within you where you already know all the things, all those spiritual truths that you read or hear, and then recognize them. I say ‚recognize‘ because you’re not… it’s not new.

Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.

We’ve come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.

You don’t need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!

All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small.

The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell.

Philosophy is the highest music.

When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

Theories are always very thin and insubstantial, experience only is tangible.

We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.

The way people look at me these days – that’s the same way I looked at President Obama before I met him. We tend to forget that people who’ve attained a certain position are human.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

Man is the most intelligent of the animals – and the most silly.

These men ask for just the same thing, fairness, and fairness only. This, so far as in my power, they, and all others, shall have.

We all have possibilities we don’t know about. We can do things we don’t even dream we can do.

Necessity never made a good bargain.

That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he’s wise.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.

There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts.

If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

Moral authority is never retained by any attempt to hold on to it. It comes without seeking and is retained without effort.

In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.

My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa, even though everyone else did because we didn’t have any money, because Africa was the ‚dark continent‘, and because I was a girl.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

The Italians and Spanish, the Chinese and Vietnamese see food as part of a larger, more essential and pleasurable part of daily life. Not as an experience to be collected or bragged about – or as a ritual like filling up a car – but as something else that gives pleasure, like sex or music, or a good nap in the afternoon.