All the songs I write are about human dynamics, whether it’s with girlfriends, boyfriends, or family.

The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.

Olympics for me is love, peace, united.

Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.

This is the hardest of all: to close the open hand out of love, and keep modest as a giver.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

I don’t know what can be so dangerous about giving people hope. Causing people to have better relationships. I’m not leading them to some false God or something like that.

My family, frankly, they weren’t folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn’t raise me in the church, so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead.

Intense feeling too often obscures the truth.

Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.

My mother fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.

I don’t think there’s an option for me to fall in love slowly or at medium speed. I either do, or I don’t.

When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.

A conqueror is always a lover of peace.

The rule of friendship means there should be mutual sympathy between them, each supplying what the other lacks and trying to benefit the other, always using friendly and sincere words.

The highest proof of the spirit is love. Love the eternal thing which can already on earth possess as it really is.

My wife and I love each other very much.

Friendship is essentially a partnership.

All of my songs are autobiographical.

Don’t get the impression that you arouse my anger. You see, one can only be angry with those he respects.

Most people would rather give than get affection.

A friend is nothing but a known enemy.

With compassion you can die for other people, like the mother who can die for her child. You have the courage to say it because you are not afraid of losing anything, because you know that understanding and love is the foundation of happiness. But if you have fear of losing your status, your position, you will not have the courage to do it.

My grandfather was smart and had a whole lot of pride. He didn’t speak a terrible amount, but you could tell there was a ton on his mind – like a quiet acceptance of how life had turned out.

A song is anything that can walk by itself.

I’m more of an adventurous type than a relationship type.

If my mother knew I did this for a living, she’d kill me. She thinks I’m selling dope.

You see, you are a spirit, you have a soul, and you live in a body. You have emotions, you have thoughts, you have a will, and you have a conscience. You are a complex being! And Jesus came to heal every single part of you. There’s not one part that He doesn’t want to make completely whole.

A mother defends herself with a heart filled with love before doing so with words. I wonder whether there is any love for the church in the hearts of those who pay so much attention to the scandals.

I had to make a choice at one point in my life, of missing films or missing my children. It was a very easy decision to make because I missed my children so very much.

You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s.

I just got to feel that whoever I marry has some real regard for me.

Football is a sad game.

Our inquiring friends and neighbors not of our faith can also catch the wave. We encourage them to keep all that is good and true in their lives. And we invite them to receive more, especially the glorious truth that through God’s eternal plan, families can be together forever.

Children make your life important.

I was fortunate and I was lucky that I had a couple of people in my life who cared about me. I had good, loving parents.

People hate as they love, unreasonably.

I grew up upper-class. Private school. My dad had a Jaguar. We’re African-American, and we work together as a family, so people assume we’re like the Jacksons. But I didn’t have parents using me to get out of a bad situation.

I make decisions all day, so it’s nice for a woman like me to go to dinner and have the man take the menu and say, ‚Let me order.‘ Other women would be offended by that, but I’m like, ‚Good. Because I can’t make one more decision today.‘ I want someone to rub my feet without being asked.

When I’m writing, I’m thinking about how the songs are going to play live. Fifty bars of rap don’t translate onstage. No matter how potent the music, you lose the crowd. They want a hook; they want to sing your stuff back to you.

Of all nature’s gifts to the human race, what is sweeter to a man than his children?

We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‚unhappy is the family that contains an author‘?

A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.

I listen to my mother, and that keeps me out of trouble. I’m a good son.

If I think too hard about a relationship, I’ll talk myself out of it.

The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.

Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can’t be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.

When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart’s the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

When I was younger, I was testing myself and questioning everything, but now it’s less about that and more about these are the years of my life with my family.

I never wanted to write the sort of song that said, ‚Look at how abnormal and crazy and out there I am, man!‘

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

Love is a state of being.

The African is my brother but he is my younger brother by several centuries.

My body is quite tiny, but a lot of the emotions I feel are pretty explosive. They have to come out.

Crankiness is at the essence of all comedy. My wife and I were discussing the different types of cranky. There’s entertaining cranky, annoying cranky, angry cranky.

Creative people don’t behave very well generally. If you’re looking for examples of good relationships in show business, you’re gonna be depressed real fast. I don’t have time for anything else right now but work and my daughter. She’s my first priority.

Most country songs, certainly all the stuff I’ve written, are stories driven by characters.

It’s not possible to stop love.

What good am I? I can’t have kids. I can’t cook. I’ve been divorced three times. Who would want me?

For me, it’s about the way I carry myself and the way I treat other people. My relationship and how I feel about God and what He does for me, is something deeply personal. It’s where I came from, my family, I was brought up in a religious household and that’s very important to me.