My career as Nipsey Hussle is based on my life as Ermias Asghedom.

Aim for the sky and you’ll reach the ceiling. Aim for the ceiling and you’ll stay on the floor.

This is not a bad life.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.

This isn’t life in the fast lane, it’s life in the oncoming traffic.

If you look deep enough you will see music; the heart of nature being everywhere music.

It is a common saying, and in everybody’s mouth, that life is but a sojourn.

As a kid, we would drive up and down 77 North – that’s our highway – there would be office buildings on the side of the highway and I’d be like, that’s what my house is going to look like when I get older. I’m going to start making my house look like this.

It was 1996 and I was at a crossroads in my career. I had been working in Hollywood as a writer and was very unhappy. I had pitched an idea for a book some six months earlier, and the book packager, Joost Elffers, wanted me to write up a treatment for it.

In such a porcelain life, one likes to be sure that all is well lest one stumble upon one’s hopes in a pile of broken crockery.

Show me someone who has done something worthwhile, and I’ll show you someone who has overcome adversity.

We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It’s a story.

Where the mind goes, the man follows.

Instead of worrying about what people say of you, why not spend time trying to accomplish something they will admire.

I grew up in a rural area called Vega Baja and I’m the first of so many talented people in this area to make it out. I take great pride to represent where I come from and I am able to show my fans, and everyone who listens and watches me, that anything is possible.

You’re born. You suffer. You die. Fortunately, there’s a loophole.

I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times.

When the first big paycheque with ‚Dumb And Dumber‘ hit, I went: ‚Gosh, I wonder if this will affect my performance. Will I do a take and think, was that worth $7 million?‘ But that never happened. If anything, it made me rebel against that thing when people who get rich start playing it safe.

I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Savior, for whose Kingdom it stands, one Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe.

I resent the implication that I’m less of a musician and a worse person for not appreciating certain works.

No one sells a song better than the person that wrote it.

I don’t go off and sit down and try to write material, because then it’s contrived and forced. I just live my life, and I see things in a word or a situation or a concept, and it will create a joke for me.

I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

‚I wish life was not so short,‘ he thought. ‚Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.‘

Most of our lives aren’t that exciting, but the drama is still going on in the small details.

Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.

Life is wasted on the living.

One of the most basic factors in sports is that winning becomes a habit, and losing is the same way. When failure starts to feel normal in your life or your work or even your darkest vices, you won’t have to go looking for trouble, because trouble will find you. Count on it.

What do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.

I have my permanent muses and my muses of the moment.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: ‚I’m with you kid. Let’s go.‘

There have to be reasons that you get up in the morning and you want to live. Why do you want to live? What’s the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? If the future does not include being out there among the stars and being a multi-planet species, I find that incredibly depressing.

All the time, I’ve felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn’t.

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

Every once in a while, I get mad. ‚The Lorax‘ came out of my being angry. The ecology books I’d read were dull… In ‚The Lorax,‘ I was out to attack what I think are evil things and let the chips fall where they might.

As much as I love the Western genre, I figured if I kept doing those, I’d eventually run out of steam on that, and that would’ve been the end of it.

Bill Gates has always been a mentor and inspiration for me even before I knew him. Just growing up, I admired how Microsoft was mission-focused.

Never lose a holy curiosity.

Death is a commingling of eternity with time; in the death of a good man, eternity is seen looking through time.

Zappa was very technical and impressed by things that were musically challenging – weird time signatures, strange keys, awkward chord sequences. Zappa was important to me as an example of everything I didn’t want to do. I’m very grateful to him, actually.

I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.

I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It’s coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don’t even know where they are.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

I want a president with a record of public service, someone whose life’s work shows our children that we don’t chase fame and fortune for ourselves: we fight to give everyone a chance to succeed.

Billy Graham is one of my great lifetime heroes. I think he epitomizes the essence of what a Christian leader should be. I have participated in some of his crusades a couple of times in Atlanta. I’ve seen the profound impact he’s had on me personally, and on other people who were not Christians and accepted Christ as Savior.

My whole life and my whole career, even through my music, I tell people: let’s unify; let’s show more love.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

Positive anything is better than negative nothing.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

Life is very difficult. One of the most ancient of religious ideas that emerges everywhere, I would say, is that life is essentially suffering.

It’s a blessing that South Africa has a man like Nelson Mandela.

I’ve been afraid of people playing their life away with too many toys.