For people who may think they know, or have snippets of who I am, you can attack that person. That’s part of being a public figure.

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

People take the little bit of information they’re fed, and they draw a picture of who you are. Most of the time, it’s wrong.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

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

He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.

As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.

Many interviewers when they come to talk to me, think they’re being progressive by not mentioning in their stories any longer that I’m black. I tell them, ‚Don’t stop now. If I shot somebody you’d mention it.‘

At 50, I began to know who I was. It was like waking up to myself.

Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.

Becoming famous was never what I wanted to do. There’s a lot of things that come with fame – it’s what people in the limelight have to do.

Catering to bad feelings feeds and empowers them.

What a heavy burden is a name that has become too famous.

By its birth, and for all time, Christianity is pledged to the Cross and dominated by the sign of the Cross. It cannot remain its own self except by identifying itself ever more intensely with the essence of the Cross.

Observe all men, thyself most.

I have no use for people who throw their weight around as celebrities, or for those who fawn over you just because you are famous.

I knew that I was ‚interesting‘ at 18 because I was aware that I could get away with doing things on stage.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

In the dim background of mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.

Never say anything about yourself you do not want to come true.

In England, when an athlete gets to the top, we do our best to destroy him.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.

Fear is the thought of admitted inferiority.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Women have no sympathy and my experience of women is almost as large as Europe.

That’s all I could ever hope for, to have a positive effect on women. ‚Cos women are powerful, powerful beings. But they’re also the most doubtful beings. They’ll never know – we’ll never know – how powerful we are.

Some people mistakenly think nature is very nice and benevolent and never betrays.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?

I would never say I was an icon, but so many people have said I am, so I suppose I am. I mean, I can’t not be what everyone says I am. But I don’t feel like an icon.

Video is growing very quickly on Facebook. A lot of people compare that to YouTube. I think that kind of makes sense. YouTube isn’t the only video service, but I think it’s the biggest, and it probably makes more sense to compare Facebook video to YouTube rather than Netflix because that’s a completely different kind of content.

I think I’ve developed, as many people do, this sense of, ‚Don’t say the wrong thing, or else people will point at you and laugh.‘

God didn’t make me to make movies, flex muscles, buy gold. What you love the most becomes your God… If I never make another dollar, my life is complete.

I worked out early on to give up things I couldn’t do well at all.

Smiling makes me feel weak and not in control and not powerful and small.

In today’s world, having money has allowed people who are extremely uncool to think that they’re cool and carry it like that. People who really are cool and people who really are artists and have ideas have to literally turn in their cool card to society just to make it past the age of 28.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.

You are the sum total of everything you’ve ever seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot – it’s all there. Everything influences each of us, and because of that I try to make sure that my experiences are positive.

See things from the boy’s point of view.

When people meet me, they say that I’m really kind – contrary to a lot of my music.

Sadly, the truth is, there aren’t many people who can be put in high positions who won’t start thinking highly of themselves.

Twitter is great to connect with fans and be transparent. I enjoy that aspect about it. But really, I’m still trying to figure it out.

I was born with a great gift, and sometimes with that comes a destructive streak.

Happiness is within the reach of everyone, rich or poor. Yet comparatively few people are happy. I believe the reason for this is that the majority don’t recognize happiness even when it is within their grasp.

I’m confident in who I am. I’ve come to a place in my life where I’ve accepted things that are me, as opposed to feeling pressure to explain myself to people around me. That’s just the way I’ve always tried to be. It didn’t change when I became a star.

Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?

Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

The real power of the Buddha was that he had so much love. He saw people trapped in their notions of small separate self, feeling guilty or proud of that self, and he offered revolutionary teachings that resounded like a lion’s roar, like a great rising tide, helping people to wake up and break free from the prison of ignorance.

You would think that a rock star being married to a supermodel would be one of the greatest things in the world. It is.

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

No one can give you better advice than yourself.

I’ve noticed a terrible thing, which is I will agree to anything if it’s far enough in the future.