Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

Even as you make progress, you need the discipline to keep from backtracking and sabotaging the success as it’s happening.

In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.

Sometimes if you got a problem deep rooted in your life, it takes a little bit of time to overcome it in that area.

I don’t live in the past at all; I’m always wanting to do something new. I make a point of constantly trying to forget and get things out of my mind.

Although the circumstances of our lives may seem very disengaged, with me standing here as the First Lady of the United States of America and you just getting through school, I want you to know we have very much in common. For nothing in my life ever would have predicted that I would be standing here as the first African-American First Lady.

I always wonder when it was that I was embraced.

I use a stream-of-consciousness approach; if you don’t censor yourself, you end up with what you’re most concerned about, but you haven’t filtered it through your conscious mind. Then you craft it.

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.

The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance.

I think that’s the single best piece of advice: constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.

While you’re saving your face, you’re losing your ass.

Things won’t get better dwelling on the past. Accept what has happened. Then move forward.

I try to teach my heart not to want things it can’t have.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

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

When you are young you tend to do so many things that are not needed. When you get experience, you know what exactly what works for you and you tend to do things that you want.

I don’t have a problem with ageing – in fact, I embrace that aspect of it. And am able to and obviously am going to be able to quite easily… it doesn’t faze me at all.

My father was a mean, controlling and manipulative person for most of his life. He was unpredictable and unstable. As a result, the atmosphere of our home was super-charged with fear because you never knew if what you did would make him mad or not.

A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.

Make bold choices and make mistakes. It’s all those things that add up to the person you become.

If you’re going to be a winner in life, you have to constantly go beyond your best.

You may make some mistakes – but that doesn’t make you a sinner. You’ve got the very nature of God on the inside of you.

Follow your honest convictions and be strong.

He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man.

It’s stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition.

Real riches are the riches possessed inside.

All of us should be on guard against beliefs that flatter ourselves. At the very least, we should check such beliefs against facts.

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves.

When one has not had a good father, one must create one.

Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none.

You should never give up your inner self.

I’m not trying to follow a set of rules and stuff. I’m just living my life.

People don’t usually compliment your character.

I’m the type person, my safe place to be emotional is the booth.

The great epochs of our life are the occasions when we gain the courage to rebaptize our evil qualities as our best qualities.

You can’t do something forever.

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.

Man is an idea, and a precious small idea once he turns his back on love.

As much as it might look like, to someone else, that I’m successful, I never feel like I’m anywhere. The further I go, I still feel equally further from my eventual goal. Because as I grow, I get more goals. I’m never content.

I know this sounds strange, but as a kid, I was really shy. Painfully shy. The turning point was freshman year, when I was the biggest geek alive. No one, I mean no one, even talked to me.

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

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride.

Your most important work is always ahead of you, never behind you.

I want to believe that I am improving. This is something that I take really seriously.

As long as the people don’t fear the truth, there is hope. For once they fear it, the one who tells it doesn’t stand a chance. And today, truth is still beautiful… but so frightening.

I have a wish. It as a fear as well – that in my end will be my beginning.

Discontent, blaming, complaining, self-pity cannot serve as a foundation for a good future, no matter how much effort you make.

If you are living out of a sense of obligation you are slave.

Do you really think it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations which it requires strength, strength and courage to yield to.

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.

When you stop caring what people think, you lose your capacity for connection. When you’re defined by it, you lose our capacity for vulnerability.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

Everything’s intentional. It’s just filling in the dots.

Ambition has become a dirty word, and I believe it is a great evolutionary force for the positive. If people fail or go astray in their ambition I can live with it but not with people lowering their expectations, wasting time, slacking off and glorifying failure and stupidity.

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers names.

Some Christians feel guilty when they are doing something that isn’t ‚spiritual.‘ Somehow or another, they feel the need to hurry through the grocery store, dash through the house cleaning, and rush through all the daily aspects of life that seem irrelevant to their faith.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.