I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force.

I believe time wounds all heels.

The worst thing I can be is the same as everybody else. I hate that.

You can’t put your feet on the ground until you’ve touched the sky.

The fact is I am not having sex. But I feel absolutely ripe for the, what would you say? plucking?

I’ve always believed in God. I also think that’s the sort of thing that either comes as part of the equipment, the capacity to believe, or at some point in your life, when you’re in a position where you actually need help from a power greater than yourself, you simply make an agreement.

If you were to ask me what I want to do – I don’t want to be a celebrity, I want to make a difference.

The voice I use is a very old hardware speech synthesizer made in 1986. I keep it because I have not heard a voice I like better and because I have identified with it.

The answer is, who you are cannot be defined through thinking or mental labels or definitions, because it’s beyond that. It is the very sense of being, or presence, that is there when you become conscious of the present moment. In essence, you and what we call the present moment are, at the deepest level, one.

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.

When I was old enough to change my name, I changed it to Mr. T so that the first word out of someone’s mouth was ‚Mister,‘ a sign of respect.

I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.

I went through a period when I felt my film characters were having more fun than I was. It might partly explain why I ended up tattooed or doing certain extreme things in my life.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

One of the things I definitely think of as a driver of me is fear. And it’s fear of failure, fear of being overtaken.

It’s not just human nature to associate in tribes. It’s deeper than that.

Frustration is a sign I am acting independently. The more you try your own way, the tighter the doors will stay closed.

He who knows himself is enlightened.

These things bring you to reality as to how fragile you are; at the same moment you are doing something that nobody else is able to do. The same moment that you are seen as the best, the fastest and somebody that cannot be touched, you are enormously fragile.

I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.

For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and everyone who humbles himself will be exalted.

A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him.

I don’t think I’m tangible to myself.

I said I was ‚The Greatest,‘ I never said I was the smartest!

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

Just because something didn’t work out your way, or somebody disappointed you, that does not change who you are.

I can imagine it’s hard to make a relationship last. I wouldn’t know.

Although the circumstances of our lives may seem very disengaged, with me standing here as the First Lady of the United States of America and you just getting through school, I want you to know we have very much in common. For nothing in my life ever would have predicted that I would be standing here as the first African-American First Lady.

You don’t have the same mentality as you did five years ago – even one year. People are always changing, and I believe that everyone deserves the space to change and for people to recognize their change.

What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.

It doesn’t matter which side of the fence you get off on sometimes. What matters most is getting off. You cannot make progress without making decisions.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.

Fear is the mother of morality.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

If you have fear, you are bound by tradition, you follow some leader or guru. When you are bound by tradition, when you are afraid of your husband or your wife, you lose your dignity as an individual human being.

Men take only their needs into consideration – never their abilities.

Only the insecure strive for security.

The fact that you are willing to say, ‚I do not understand, and it is fine,‘ is the greatest understanding you could exhibit.

We all self-conscious. I’m just the first to admit it.

Every great person is always being helped by everybody; for their gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.

I feel like everything we do comes down to how it looks. Even no branding is branding. For example, you had no face or image to put to my music at first. That was branding.

Honor thy error as a hidden intention.

I became a people-watcher when I lost all my friends when I was 12.

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

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.

Our passions are like convulsion fits, which, though they make us stronger for a time, leave us the weaker ever after.

The ego is only an illusion, but a very influential one. Letting the ego-illusion become your identity can prevent you from knowing your true self. Ego, the false idea of believing that you are what you have or what you do, is a backwards way of assessing and living life.

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.

Don’t compare yourself with other people; compare yourself with who you were yesterday.

It’s a philosophy of life. A practice. If you do this, something will change, what will change is that you will change, your life will change, and if you can change you, you can perhaps change the world.

One of the greatest lessons of my own life was learning to turn the inner rampage of hatred and anger toward my own father for his reprehensible behavior and abandonment of his family into an inner reaction more closely aligned with God and God-realized love.

Never do things others can do and will do if there are things others cannot do or will not do.

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

Many people feel so pressured by the expectations of others that it causes them to be frustrated, miserable and confused about what they should do. But there is a way to live a simple, joy-filled, peaceful life, and the key is learning how to be led by the Holy Spirit, not the traditions or expectations of man.

Everyone goes through adversity in life, but what matters is how you learn from it.

Modesty is a learned affectation. And as soon as life slams the modest person against the wall, that modesty drops.

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