For me, already being part of a single parent household and knowing it was just me and my mom, you’d would wake up times and hope that the next day you’d be able to be alongside your mother because she was out trying to make sure that I was taken care of. But all I cared about was her being home.

My whole family have all been through a difficult time. My focus is my children, our children.

It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

The important thing is that your teammates have to know you’re pulling for them and you really want them to be successful.

You can’t blame gravity for falling in love.

I didn’t have any children of my own.

The sadness of the women’s movement is that they don’t allow the necessity of love. See, I don’t personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.

There’s a bond among a kitchen staff, I think. You spend more time with your chef in the kitchen than you do with your own family.

Intimates are predestined.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

When I look at acting careers that I really admire, I see that it’s been a precise decision-making process for these people. They make decisions based on what they love, and they do only the things that they are passionate about. They play only characters that they can’t stop thinking about.

I met my husband before I became a star, and he doesn’t care about any of it.

I think ‚The Color Purple‘ is so bursting with love, the need for connection, the showing of the need for connection around the globe.

It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.

I lived a sloppy life. So I took very small increments in my life. I started making my bed. I started cleaning my room. There were dishes in the sink. It started off with doing small house chores. I saw that the yard needed to be mowed. So instead of being told it needed to be mowed, I would mow it.

Because of a great love, one is courageous.

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

I had a C-section, and I found it fascinating. I didn’t find it a sacrifice, and I didn’t find it a painful experience. I found it a fascinating miracle of what a body can do.

In our home there was always prayer – aloud, proud and unapologetic.

The child in you, like all children, loves to laugh, to be around people who can laugh at themselves and life. Children instinctively know that the more laughter we have in our lives, the better.

Love is a really scary thing, and you never know what’s going to happen. It’s one of the most beautiful things in life, but it’s one of the most terrifying. It’s worth the fear because you have more knowledge, experience, you learn from people, and you have memories.

There have been many great men that have flattered the people who ne’er loved them.

I don’t feel much pressure to fit in. I never have. I’ve always just wanted to do my thing. I have really good friends and good family, and if I don’t fit in somewhere else, I fit in at home.

Whenever a youth is ascertained to possess talents meriting an education which his parents cannot afford, he should be carried forward at the public expense.

Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don’t do any good, but they don’t necessarily do any harm. It’s touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I’ve got my just desserts.

Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.

A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

A loving heart is the truest wisdom.

I am radically, insanely, nutty in love with Jesus!

No one wants advice – only corroboration.

If you’re the parent, be a parent. You know what I mean? I’m a parent. I have daughters.

Jesus never mistreated anyone just because they mistreated Him. He confronted them in a spirit of gentleness and then continued to love them.

I think it is a sin to look at another person as inferior to yourself because of race or because of ethnic background, and I think the greatest thing to do is to pray that God will give you love for them, and I do.

I think, because I started Virgin when I was a teenager, it has become a part of me, like my family, and I am motivated by ambition for it, almost as if it were a child.

To witness two lovers is a spectacle for the gods.

Agape, the love of each one of us for the other, from the closest to the furthest, is in fact the only way that Jesus has given us to find the way of salvation and of the Beatitudes.

It is totally different making films in the East than in the West. In the East, I make my own Jackie Chan films, and it’s like my family. Sometimes I pick up the camera because I choreograph all the fighting scenes, even when I’m not fighting. I don’t have my own chair. I just sit on the set with everybody.

Nashville is my home, and the reason why I get to do what I love.

My three children have brought me great joy.

If I could have worked from the time I was born until I was 18 and never had to work again, I would have done it.

If you are not being bullied all I would say – cause I like to talk about the other side of it as well – is you know, be someone that nurtures, and if there’s someone in your class that maybe doesn’t have a lot of friends, be the person that sits with them in the cafeteria sometimes; be the bigger person.

It is, after all, the responsibility of the expert to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it.

I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.

Responsibility, I believe, accrues through privilege.

I love the ending of a movie where two people end up together. Preferably if there’s rain and an airport or running or a confession of love.

I would say the most satisfying thing actually is watching my three children each pick up on their own interests and work many more hours per week than most people that have jobs at trying to intelligently give away that money in fields that they particularly care about.

I always wanted to be a father and thought it would be great, but it just took the right woman and the right time to make it all happen.

Commitment is an act, not a word.

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

This is love: the flowering of love is meditation.

My songs are like my children – I expect them to support me when I’m old.

With Benghazi, I don’t see anyone saying, ‚Hey look, I am overall responsible for this and therefore, I take responsibility for what happened. It’s my fault.‘ I haven’t heard that yet. Meanwhile, the other side of the coin, the Osama bin Laden raid, it seems everyone made that decision, and that’s just unbelievable to me.

My best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake.

It’s hard knowing who to trust with your personal life. When you cry in your room at night, you don’t always know who to call. So I am very close to my family.

Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player.

What starts the process, really, are laughs and slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance.

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.

Many people mistake our work for our vocation. Our vocation is the love of Jesus.