Getting money is not all a man’s business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.

Time heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons. Neither the offender nor the offended are any more themselves.

For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.

From 1945 to 1974, the Western world – including America – was more socialistic than capitalistic, more pro-labor than pro-business.

Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us… While what we call ‚our own life‘ remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make ‚our own life‘ less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It’s rage, it’s creativity, it’s pain, it’s hurt, but it’s the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music.

One of the things I definitely think of as a driver of me is fear. And it’s fear of failure, fear of being overtaken.

Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.

If you give, you will be blessed.

When I was a youngster I lived with different families. I nearly always felt closer to the man of the house. Maybe because I always dreamed of having a father of my own.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I’m on course, and I’m doing what God wants me to do. I’m real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.

To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.

Speak ill of no man, but speak all the good you know of everybody.

Sometimes I feel like being an intellectual. Sometimes I like to just be aggressive and all the way in my feelings. Sometimes I might be emotional, or sometimes I might drag on the track and be lazy. I just like to share the different states of existence of Kevin Gates with the rest of the world.

I’m the proof – you can’t throw away tradition.

Listening to and understanding our inner sufferings will resolve most of the problems we encounter.

I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.

It was high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‚always do what you are afraid to do.‘

Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

When I was into my 30s, I became increasingly depressed by rejection letters. I had had the feeling that by the time I was 30, I would be established. But I was not at all. By the time of ‚Lives of Girls and Women,‘ I was into my 40s and I had become more thin-skinned.

You can’t do something forever.

I want you to feel happy and enjoy the theatre of my life the way that I do. No matter what happens with my music and wherever I go – that heart of that glamorous girl in New York will never be gone.

I kinda live where I find myself.

I went through a period when I felt my film characters were having more fun than I was. It might partly explain why I ended up tattooed or doing certain extreme things in my life.

People respond when you tell them there is a great future in front of you, you can leave your past behind.

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.

When I was old enough to change my name, I changed it to Mr. T so that the first word out of someone’s mouth was ‚Mister,‘ a sign of respect.

I definitely connected to the fact that life gets out of control and you end up doing things and wishing you were doing other things instead.

We should every night call ourselves to an account: what infirmity have I mastered today? what passions opposed? what temptation resisted? what virtue acquired? Our vices will abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.

Knowledge cultivates your seeds and does not sow in your seeds.

The final proof of greatness lies in being able to endure criticism without resentment.

It’s better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone – so far.

A person who is too nice an observer of the business of the crowd, like one who is too curious in observing the labor of bees, will often be stung for his curiosity.

Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt.

I’m more of a realist when it comes to life, and I’d much rather my mother be in a spiritual place in Heaven than in a bed, sick, fighting for her life.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

Get mad, then get over it.

Enemies are so stimulating.

The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it: so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

My parents were the same in the pulpit as they were at home. I think that’s where a lot of preachers‘ kids get off base sometimes. Because they don’t see the same things at both places.

Understand this law and you will then know, beyond room for the slightest doubt, that you are constantly punishing yourself for every wrong you commit and rewarding yourself for every act of constructive conduct in which you indulge.

I just hate meetings. Though it’s true that once you’ve made a lot of money, people around you might be full of ideas about ways to make lots more money and might be disappointed that you don’t want to seize every opportunity to do so.

Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.

Life is an adventure, it’s not a package tour.

I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.

My work is the only ground I’ve ever had to stand on. To put it bluntly, I seem to have a whole superstructure with no foundation, but I’m working on the foundation.

He who angers you conquers you.

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.

I think Bible principles are principles for life.

I make preparations both to live and to die every day, but with the emphasis on not dying, and on acting as if I was going to carry on living.

If you’re going to spend two years of your life on something, it has to matter to you; you have to be passionate about it.

I think everybody’s trying to get to a place in themselves where they conquer what they was afraid of; they achieve some of their life goals, kept their word about what they were trying to do.