I never looked at my mantel and envisioned an MVP trophy sitting there. This is pretty crazy.

Always remember that others may hate you but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.

How do I confront aging? With a wonder and a terror. Yeah, I’ll say that. Wonder and terror.

I was born with a great gift, and sometimes with that comes a destructive streak.

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

In so many ways, segregation shaped me, and education liberated me.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

Everything is political. I will never be a politician or even think political. Me just deal with life and nature. That is the greatest thing to me.

I worked with someone who told me they’d never like me. But for some reason, I just felt like I needed her approval. So I started changing myself to please her. It made me stop being social and friendly. I was so unhappy.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

All ways of living can be sanctified, and for each individual, the ideal way is that to which our Lord leads him through the natural development of his tastes and the pressure of circumstances.

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.

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.

Thoughts are fine when you don’t confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are.

People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location.

You can’t go backward in life.

It is never too late to give up our prejudices.

I don’t think there’s anyone who would say they don’t want or need more of God’s power in their life.

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

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

I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.

First, I’m trying to prove to myself that I’m a person. Then maybe I’ll convince myself that I’m an actress.

Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance.

We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.

I’m a super-duper over-analyzer. You mix that with self-doubt and pressure, and that’s never healthy.

I’m not a natural joiner.

The only things worth learning are the things you learn after you know it all.

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

It’s normal for human beings to identify with their own separate self. The problem is that we get caught in that notion of ourself as a separate individual and caught in that individual self’s agenda.

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

I let the American people down.

To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.

Take the complications, rules, shoulds, musts, have tos, and so on out of your life. By uncomplicating your life and removing the trivial pursuits that occupy so much of it, you open a channel for the genius within you to emerge.

I long remained a child, and I am still one in many respects.

I was ironing my own clothes when I was 11 years old. My mental strength goes back to those days.

In whatever adulation you get, there’s truth and there’s not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible – there’s truth and there’s not truth. It’s human nature to like to read the adulation more.

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.

Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.

As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task.

Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones on hand do more to produce a happy life than the volumes we can’t find.

You can’t have it all all at once. Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all, but in given periods in time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

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

Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I’ve never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

Had I been a great athlete, I’m not sure I would have even gone into coaching. I may have turned out feeling that my life ended when my athletic career ended, as happens so many times with various athletes.

To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.

A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar.

Let go of yesterday.

Arthur Miller wouldn’t have married me if I had been nothing but a dumb blonde.

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

Sometimes I’m a bit under-aggressive and sometimes a bit over. But I think it’s good to have both.