I don’t know what ‚normal‘ means, anyway.

O‘ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

When I was 11, the whole world was closed to me. I just felt I was on the outside of the world.

Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.

One of the things I did when I discovered this huge importance of being vulnerable is very happily moved away from the shame research, because that’s such a downer, and people hate that topic. It’s not that vulnerability is the upside, but it’s better than shame, I guess.

Your love is not outside; it is deep within you. You can never lose it, and it cannot leave you. It is not dependent on some other body, some external form.

People – especially white people – they want me to be a role model just because of the life I lead. The things I say in my songs, they expect it of me.

India does not need to become anything else. India must become only India. This is a country that once upon a time was called the golden bird.

I’ve never been a boyfriend kind of girl.

Early on in my life, I had a broken soul. I was abused by my father, abandoned by my mother and ended up in a destructive first marriage. By the time I was 23, I was broken in my soul. I didn’t know how to think right. I felt wrong about everything. But God stepped into my life, and I came out on the other side and didn’t even smell like smoke.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

I don’t really regard myself as a political figure.

There are a lot of people who don’t know me and what I am all about.

Comedians are sociologists. We’re pointing out stuff that the general public doesn’t even stop to think about, looking at life in slow-motion and questioning everything we see.

Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

I am what I am. A fighter.

It’s an endless proving of myself, that I really am a musician, that I have something to offer in the room. That women can be musicians, women can be rock stars, women can be more than an objectified idea of a pop star.

When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do well, that’s Memoirs.

If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

What’s the greater risk? Letting go of what people think – or letting go of how I feel, what I believe, and who I am?

The darkness is really out there. It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world.

I don’t think I ever thought of myself as Superman. But there were people who thought of me that way, and maybe I believed them a little.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

I want to be just a pure spiritual leader.

I knew I wanted to do something creative. I didn’t think I’d have the luxury of doing something like that, because I didn’t know anyone who had pursued anything they really adored, but I had dreams for singing or writing.

We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

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

Many people look at me and think they know me but they don’t at all. This is the real me. I am a humble person, a feeling person. A person who cares about others, who wants to help others.

Many a man thinks he is patient when, in reality, he is indifferent.

Why do I not seek some real good; one which I could feel, not one which I could display?

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‚blackness‘ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don’t think anyone in my family would really feel I’d done them an injustice by saying that. We didn’t see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job, I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: ‚Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don’t you realize that?‘ They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn’t want to enter their minds.

When I was younger, I was testing myself and questioning everything, but now it’s less about that and more about these are the years of my life with my family.

Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.

There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; we have no place to go.

Being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical.

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

You gotta keep trying to find your niche and trying to fit into whatever slot that’s left for you or to make one of your own.

I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or even beautiful, but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else.

I owe my solitude to other people.

I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion.

It has not yet become obvious to me that there’s no real problem. I cannot define the real problem; therefore, I suspect there’s no real problem, but I’m not sure there’s no real problem.

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves – and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

‚They‘ is… stay away from them, please. There is so many different definitions of ‚they.‘ You might have a personal ‚they.‘ They against you; they want you broken and miserable. They don’t like winners; they don’t like people who’s blessed. So everybody’s got a different ‚they.‘

The first two games for Churchill, I was so jittery that I didn’t know what to do. I was running more but didn’t know what to do. I’ve no bones accepting the fact that I didn’t know what was happening in the game.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.