I always wanted a great love affair: something that feels big and full, really honest, and enough. No moment should feel slight, false, or a little off. For me, it had to be everything.

The truth is: Belonging starts with self-acceptance. Your level of belonging, in fact, can never be greater than your level of self-acceptance, because believing that you’re enough is what gives you the courage to be authentic, vulnerable and imperfect.

It’s in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life. It’s not in happiness. It’s not in impulsive pleasure.

Nothing is stopping me from doing what I love to do.

Moral authority comes from following universal and timeless principles like honesty, integrity, treating people with respect.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?

Sometimes it’s a form of love just to talk to somebody that you have nothing in common with and still be fascinated by their presence.

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.

I’m first and foremost a writer. I followed my personal legend, my childhood dream of becoming a writer, but I can’t say why I’m one.

I love food.

I had the classic 40 meltdown. I did. It’s embarrassing. It was pretty funny. But then I recovered. To me, it was like a second adolescence. Hormonally, my body was changing, my mind was changing, and so my relationship to myself and the world around me came to this assault of finiteness.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

I love to flirt, and I’ve never met a man I didn’t like.

Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.

I’ve always wanted a baby.

I became interested in folk music because I had to make it somehow.

The surest way to remain poor is to be an honest man.

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me.

By a lie, a man… annihilates his dignity as a man.

Someday I want to have children and give them all the love I never had.

I have to be in tune. All the time. I have to be in tune with my husband, where he is, how he’s feeling. I have to be in tune with where my family is.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

My parents taught me never to judge others based on whom they love, what color their skin is, or their religion.

What I cry out for, like every being, with my whole life and all my earthly passion, is something very different from an equal to cherish: it is a God to adore.

We learned about honesty and integrity – that the truth matters… that you don’t take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules… and success doesn’t count unless you earn it fair and square.

The love of the family, the love of one person can heal. It heals the scars left by a larger society. A massive, powerful society.

I really love training and being in good shape, and it’s so much a part of my life now, so it never really feels like work to me.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

The faster you go, the shorter you are.

That we must love one God only is a thing so evident that it does not require miracles to prove it.

I change my mind a lot. I usually don’t agree with what I say very much. I’m an awful liar.

I was in Europe and it was at this stage that I fell in love with Americans in uniform. And I continue to have that love affair.

I have feelings too. I am still human. All I want is to be loved, for myself and for my talent.

Integrity has no need of rules.

But even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.

However happy people say they are, nobody is satisfied: we always have to be with the prettiest woman, buy a bigger house, change cars, desire what we do not have.

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.

I have kind of a funny relationship with movies. I don’t have to see the whole movie to get an impression of it or to let it have an influence on me.

We’re just enthusiastic about what we do.

Husbands are chiefly good as lovers when they are betraying their wives.

All I have to say is basically if performing, singing, acting, and dancing is what you want to do, then you just have to do it – no matter where it is.

Where thou art, that is home.

Jealousy is just love and hate at the same time.

I wish people would love everybody else the way they love me. It would be a better world.

For me, one of the toughest things about Valentine’s Day is that it gets geared up as the day to profess your love. See, T-E-S-T – that’s a bad word that doesn’t go with L-O-V-E.

Let me define a leader. He must have vision and passion and not be afraid of any problem. Instead, he should know how to defeat it. Most importantly, he must work with integrity.

Ambition is the immoderate desire for power.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

Music is in my DNA!

Strong emotions such as passion and bliss are indications that you’re connected to Spirit, or ‚inspired,‘ if you will. When you’re inspired, you activate dormant forces, and the abundance you seek in any form comes streaming into your life.

As for doing good; that is one of the professions which is full. Moreover I have tried it fairly and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.

I am deeply grateful to the citizens of Sarajevo and the Sarajevo Canton assembly for bestowing upon me this incredible honor of citizenship. I am so proud to now be a part of such an extraordinary part of the world and fellow citizen to the people I deeply love and admire.

Everything is an open book. I don’t speak on other people’s hardship, but if it happened in my life or something that has been an experience on my particular journey, I’m going to talk about it. That’s what my fan base appreciates the most. I’m universal. You can relate to the things I say or that I go through.

The incomparable greatness of the religions of the East lies in their having been second to none in vibrating with the passion for unity. This note, which is essential to every form of mysticism, has even penetrated them so deeply that we find ourselves falling under a spell simply by uttering the names of their Gods.

The person who grieves suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn‘ fool if they weren’t.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

The word ‚romance,‘ according to the dictionary, means excitement, adventure, and something extremely real. Romance should last a lifetime.

Aside from singing, I’m also a dancer. I’ve been dancing since I was 8.

The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.