I heard that when Christina Aguilera went back to her prom, people, like, booed her. I can’t imagine going through that. If you know that’s going to happen, why put yourself in that situation? I’d rather play for 20,000 screaming people, you know?

A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don’t function as we were meant to. We break. We fall apart. We numb. We ache. We hurt others. We get sick.

Fame is fickle, and I know it. It has its compensations but it also has its drawbacks, and I’ve experienced them both.

I knew through the surgeries that he was on my side and that this wasn’t something where I was gonna feel less of a woman, because my husband wasn’t gonna let that happen.

How you go about testing is just very different to just being in the situation of qualifying, having to go out, having to nail the lap.

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

I really thought I was on the way out. My husband Blake saved my life. Often I don’t know what I do, then the next day the memory returns. And then I am engulfed in shame.

I defy gravity.

I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.

Romcoms are hard in a lot of ways: they’re built to be buoyant. It’s easy to demean them.

We can’t all be heroes, because somebody has to sit on the curb and applaud when they go by.

I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.

The reward of suffering is experience.

People have this capacity within them to set the world straight.

Our vanity is hardest to wound precisely when our pride has just been wounded.

Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

Well, I don’t think there’s any need for people to focus on my career.

Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.

If you were the President of the United States or the Queen of England – you couldn’t have a person who would be more protective than my mother was for me. Which meant really that I could dare to do all sorts of things.

Success is due to our stretching to the challenges of life. Failure comes when we shrink from them.

I do not believe any of the statistical claims that are made about public opinion. I don’t see why anybody does.

My only fault is that I don’t realize how great I really am.

If you raise your children to feel that they can accomplish any goal or task they decide upon, you will have succeeded as a parent and you will have given your children the greatest of all blessings.

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.

As a child of God, I am greater than anything that can happen to me.

I am not handsome or sexy. Of course, it’s not like I am hopeless.

And above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.

Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.

Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.

He didn’t come out of my belly, but my God, I’ve made his bones, because I’ve attended to every meal, and how he sleeps, and the fact that he swims like a fish because I took him to the ocean. I’m so proud of all those things. But he is my biggest pride.

Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world.

Good luck has its storms.

I use my celebrity status to inspire someone, to give them hope.

Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.

I performed in a bowling alley before while people were still bowling. Cut the check, and I will perform anywhere.

The vibe in our locker room is real energetic and fun and real personable, I think from Day 1. That gets you through a lot of tough times, where in hard times, it might be common nature for guys to do their own thing and split up and become silent.

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

I need to do well and show I’m a worthy driver in F1.

This is a ruthless world and one must be ruthless to cope with it.

My whole life is a theater piece.

Feeling sorry for ourselves is the most useless waste of energy on the planet. It does absolutely no good. We can’t let our circumstances or what others do or don’t do control us. We can decide to be happy regardless.

As far as a glass ceiling, I feel that all you can do is give it your absolute best with whatever gifts the universe has given you. And if you make it in some way that other people can recognize, that’s fine. But even if you don’t quote-unquote make it, you’re fine if you’ve given it your whole heart and soul.

Ninety percent of all music is always crap, and when too many people decide they’re going to have guitar bands, then ninety percent of them are going to be crap. It’s just a given law.

In business, the idea of measuring what you are doing, picking the measurements that count like customer satisfaction and performance… you thrive on that.

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.

My dad was into the 1950s doo-wop era. If you look at those groups, or at James Brown, Jackie Wilson and the Temptations in the 1960s, you’ll see you had to be sharp onstage.

Fame hit me like a ton of bricks.

No sanction can stand against ignited minds.

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

I affirm to you the tremendous potential you have, not beyond anything you could ever imagine.

When your dream is bigger than you are, you only have two choices: give up or get help.

I’m trying to show everybody that I’m a girl, and I’m five foot four, and you can do anything you want, no matter your gender. It’s your world, too!

The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

Whenever a high-profile leader dies, people immediately attempt to summarize that person’s life in a sentence. Often, critics and commentators get caught up looking at the leader’s style, or which political or philosophical camp they represented.

I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.

When someone bestows something on you, no matter how true it is, when someone says, ‚Sexiest Man Alive,‘ I’m honestly going, ‚Thank you. Right on.‘ For me, it’s never canceled out anything, it’s never made me go, ‚Does this make me less talented of an actor?‘

Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.