I had given up some youth for knowledge, but my gain was more valuable than the loss.

Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?

In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.

Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.

Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us… While what we call ‚our own life‘ remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make ‚our own life‘ less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?

The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.

I am quite serious when I say that I do not believe there are, on the whole earth besides, so many intensified bores as in these United States. No man can form an adequate idea of the real meaning of the word, without coming here.

Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.

Whatever good things we build end up building us.

A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.

I don’t know driving in another way which isn’t risky. Each one has to improve himself. Each driver has its limit. My limit is a little bit further than other’s.

What religion a man holds, to what race he belongs, these things are not important; the really important thing is this knowledge: the knowledge of God’s plan for men. For God has a plan, and that plan is evolution.

As long as you blame someone or something else – something outside you that’s bigger than you are – as the source of your problems, the problems won’t get solved.

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

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

I think the great part about what I do is that there’s a scoreboard. At the end of every week, you know how you did. You know how well you prepared. You know whether you executed your game plan. There’s a tangible score.

My company survives because I’ve learned to respect the ideas of people younger than me and recognize when my wisdom is obsolete.

The unsuccessful person is burdened by learning, and prefers to walk down familiar paths. Their distaste for learning stunts their growth and limits their influence.

To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.

The best of us must sometimes eat our words.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

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.

Sometimes when you make a film you can go away for three months and then come back and live your life. But this struck a much deeper chord. I don’t have the ability yet to speak about it in an objective.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

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

The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared with that of which we are ignorant.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

I think I have to trust that you end up with the person you’re supposed to end up with, and that everything in between is there to teach you stuff.

Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

I think so many people live their whole life in fear and doubt and shame.

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

My life is my argument.

How prone to doubt, how cautious are the wise!

An empowered organisation is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organisational success.

Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.

Truth cannot be brought down; rather, the individual must make the effort to ascend to it. You cannot bring the mountaintop to the valley. If you would attain to the mountaintop, you must pass through the valley, climb the steeps, unafraid of the dangerous precipices.

Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.

The most happy man is he who knows how to bring into relation the end and beginning of his life.

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.

Do not ask for what you will wish you had not got.

People make jokes about my bosoms, why don’t they look underneath the breasts at the heart? It’s obvious I’ve got big ones and if people want to assume they’re not mine, then let them.

I never learn anything talking. I only learn things when I ask questions.

If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

If you have an enemy, then learn and know your enemy, don’t just be mad at him or her.

There’s very little advice in men’s magazines, because men don’t think there’s a lot they don’t know. Women do. Women want to learn. Men think, ‚I know what I’m doing, just show me somebody naked.‘

There are people in the world who have skills and strength and talent that I will never have. Never. These notions that you can ‚be whatever you want to be as long as you want it bad enough‘ are not true. They are fairy tales.

Playing Etta James in the movie ‚Cadillac Records‘ really changed me. It was a darker character, and I realized that if anything is too comfortable, I want to run from it. It’s no fun being safe.

With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.

I don’t tell people, ‚You’re okay the way that you are.‘ That’s not the right story. The right story is, ‚You’re way less than you could be.‘

Doubt grows with knowledge.

How can I be useful, of what service can I be? There is something inside me, what can it be?

To know anything well involves a profound sensation of ignorance.

If there is only one thing in my life that I am proud of, it’s that I’ve never been a kept woman.

I don’t like to read things that people write about me. I’d rather read what kids have to say about me because it’s not their profession to do that.

The first duty of man is to conquer fear; he must get rid of it, he cannot act till then.

All wrong-doing arises because of mind. If mind is transformed can wrong-doing remain?