I love my friends and my past, and it’s made me who I am.

If you are living out of a sense of obligation you are slave.

The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions.

When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.

By having a reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world By practicing reverence for life we become good, deep, and alive.

Partition is bad. But whatever is past is past. We have only to look to the future.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

I could fall in love with a sumo wrestler if he told stories and made me laugh. Obviously, it would be easier if someone was African-American and lived next door and went to the same church. Because then I wouldn’t have to translate.

When you have kids, you see life through different eyes. You feel love more deeply and are maybe a little more compassionate. It’s inevitable that that would make its way into your songwriting.

If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.

The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

A great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.

Barack knows the American Dream because he’s lived it, and he wants everyone in this country to have that same opportunity, no matter who we are or where we’re from or what we look like or who we love.

In a universe that’s an intelligent system with a divine creative force supporting it, there simply can be no accidents. As tough as it is to acknowledge, you had to go through what you went through in order to get to where you are today, and the evidence is that you did.

If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?

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

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

May we so love as never to have occasion to repent of our love!

You simply have to accept that your demons are a part of you.

I think I’m like most people – we fear the unknown and the things that have yet to come to pass, which are the very things that don’t deserve to be feared. When you give God complete control, it’s very hard not to be fearless.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what’s going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.

I can do whatever I want.

Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.

I vividly remember a conversation I had many years ago in 1974, which marked a turning point in my leadership journey. I was sitting at a Holiday Inn with my friend, Kurt Campmeyer, when he asked me if I had a personal growth plan. I didn’t. In fact, I didn’t even know you were supposed to have one.

My life is mine to remember.

Thinking is a wonderful tool if it’s applied. Thinking, however, can not become the master. Thinking is a very bad master. If you’re dominated by thinking then your life becomes very restricted.

Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.

I knew ‚Crenshaw‘ had elevated me and distinguished me.

In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong. Why not try and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom?

For me, ‚risky‘ is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.

It is not love that should be depicted as blind, but self-love.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

My purpose is to help people look at themselves and begin to shift their concepts. Remember, we are not our country, our race, or religion. We are eternal spirits. Seeing ourselves as spiritual beings without label is a way to transform the world and reach a sacred place for all of humanity.

If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.

To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best.

‚Perfection‘ to me is, I walk away from a situation and say, ‚I did everything I could do right there. There was nothing more that I could do.‘ I was a hundred percent, like the meter was at the top. There was nothing else I could have done. You know? Like, I worked as hard as I possibly could have. That’s perfection.

I definitely don’t think that money can buy you love. It can buy you affection but certainly not love.

Alas, I am a woman friendless, hopeless!

The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.

I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.

I went through a lot of battles in high school.

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

Your attitude towards failure determines your altitude after failure.

I felt I had to solve everyone’s problems.

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

Whatever that means, however you got on that mountain, why not try to climb it? And do it in your own way.

When the bank asks me about my assets, I include my friendship with Regis Philbin.

I used to have insecurity about my finances, then I announced that I had debt, and now I don’t have any insecurities.

I used to feel unsafe right in the moment of an accomplishment – I felt the ground fall from under my feet because this could be the end. And even now, while everyone is celebrating, I’m on to the next thing. I don’t want to get lost in this big cushion of success.

Marriage is a school itself. Also, having children. Becoming a father changed my whole life. It taught me as if by revelation.

But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

But by reading them again and again finally I was able to grasp the essential part. What emotion, enthusiasm, enlightenment and confidence they communicated to me! I wept for joy.

It pays to know the enemy – not least because at some time you may have the opportunity to turn him into a friend.

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.

I’m the type person, my safe place to be emotional is the booth.

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.