But your questions, which are unanswerable without exception, all spring from the same erroneous thinking.

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

Now, you lose something in your life, or you come into a conflict, and there’s gonna come a time that you’re gonna know: There was a reason for that. And at the end of your life, all the things you thought were periods, they turn out to be commas. There was never a full stop in any of it.

Some days I totally appreciate everything that’s happening to me, and some days I feel everyone’s waiting for me to mess up.

‚Trilogy‘ was more of a claustrophobic body of work. Before it was released, I hadn’t left my city for 21 years, and I had never been on a plane, not once. I spent my entire life on one setting; that’s probably why pieces of the album feel like one long track, because that’s what my life felt like. It felt like one long song.

Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.

Observe all men, thyself most.

Then suddenly something just kicked me. I kind of woke up and realised that I was in a different atmosphere than you normally are. My immediate reaction was to back off, slow down.

From my close observation of writers… they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.

When I see myself as an old woman, I just think about being happy. And hopefully, I’ll still be fly.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

I try not to think about my life. I have no life. I need therapy.

I always wonder when it was that I was embraced.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

I’ve been careful in love. I’ve been careless in love. And I’ve had adventures I wouldn’t trade for anything.

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking.

There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

It’s like a jar of salad dressing sitting on a shelf… most of the seasoning settles to the bottom of the bottle. But when you shake that bottle up, all the ingredients mix together and then the dressing can add flavor to a salad. In the same way, we can stir ourselves up and regain the reverence, respect and awe we once had for the Lord.

My life has been one great big joke, a dance that’s walked a song that’s spoke, I laugh so hard I almost choke when I think about myself.

Learn to think continentally.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

I love playing ego and insecurity combined.

If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.

I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.

I’m almost like three people. There’s me the, Dolly, the person. There’s me, the star. And then there’s me, the manager.

When you’re 40, you can’t ride the fence anymore. You gotta make definite decisions about your life.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.

Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn’t enough and you have to go and get shot or something.

I walk every day, and I look at the mountains and the fields and the small city, and I say: ‚Oh my God, what a blessing.‘ Then you realise it’s important to put it in a context beyond this woman, this man, this city, this country, this universe.

Have you ever asked yourselves what you are going to do when you grow up? In all likelihood you will get married, and before you know where you are, you will be mothers and fathers; and you will then be tied to a job, or to the kitchen, in which you will gradually wither away. Is that all that your life is going to be?

I am always wary of decisions made hastily. I am always wary of the first decision, that is, the first thing that comes to my mind if I have to make a decision. This is usually the wrong thing. I have to wait and assess, looking deep into myself, taking the necessary time.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

I am in my own head most of the time.

A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

I try to be the same person I was yesterday.

Too often in life, something happens and we blame other people for us not being happy or satisfied or fulfilled. So the point is, we all have choices, and we make the choice to accept people or situations or to not accept situations.

I wake up some mornings and sit and have my coffee and look out at my beautiful garden, and I go, ‚Remember how good this is. Because you can lose it.‘

I suppose for a very long time I’ve been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

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

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

Most of the time I spend when I get up in the morning is trying to figure out what is going to happen.

Employers and business leaders need people who can think for themselves – who can take initiative and be the solution to problems.

As for my own views, they’ve of course evolved over the years. This conception of ‚renouncing beliefs‘ is very odd, as if we’re in some kind of religious cult. I ‚renounce beliefs‘ practically every time I think about the topics or find out what someone else is thinking.

I wake up in the morning and my heart is light, man. It’s not heavy. I don’t have skeletons in the closet on their way out.

Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone.

The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one’s self.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

I think and that is all that I am.

Sometimes we be playing the politics too much and forget who we are just to win.

To be ashamed of one’s immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one’s morality.

I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? 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.

What I see, what I went through, what a friend of mine may have went through, whatever – I rap about it.

Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.

There are very few people who are going to look into the mirror and say, ‚That person I see is a savage monster;‘ instead, they make up some construction that justifies what they do.

It’s hard to be clear about who you are when you are carrying around a bunch of baggage from the past. I’ve learned to let go and move more quickly into the next place.

I’m on record that it didn’t really traumatize me to do away with some people.

Well, I screwed it up real good, didn’t I?

I will be unhappy if I know I have not accomplished something I should have done that was possible.