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

Healthy discontent is the prelude to progress.

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

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.

Remembering what you’ve been through and how that has strengthened your mindset can lift you out of a negative brain loop and help you bypass those weak, one-second impulses to give in. Even if you’re feeling low and beat down by life right now, I guarantee you can think of a time or two when you overcame odds and tasted success.

When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs.

I spent a lot of years trying to outrun or outsmart vulnerability by making things certain and definite, black and white, good and bad. My inability to lean into the discomfort of vulnerability limited the fullness of those important experiences that are wrought with uncertainty: Love, belonging, trust, joy, and creativity to name a few.

I put my flaws on front street. So the world accepted my flaws, so I don’t have any flaws.

I thought one should have the attitude of ‚What do you care what other people think!‘

Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.

Playing Etta James in the movie ‚Cadillac Records‘ really changed me. It was a darker character, and I realized that if anything is too comfortable, I want to run from it. It’s no fun being safe.

Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.

I really have had to swallow my own prejudice at times.

Songs for me are like a message in a bottle. You send them out to the world, and maybe the person who you feel that way about will hear about it someday.

Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit.

How one life turns out is not dependent on what people do to us or what they don’t do for us.

Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it.

I really believed that fear is contagious.

For a long time I was scared I’d find out I was like my mother.

The man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possession of anything else to which he is justly entitled.

I like the way the stories of my relationships sound to music more than the way they look in print, in gossip columns or in me talking about them in interviews. I think it’s a better way of telling the stories.

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

We all die, we all get sick, we all feel hunger and lust and pain, and therefore human life is consistent from one generation to the other. We all – most of us, anyway – want connections with other people and spend our lives looking for them.

When I write, it’s like choosing which shoes I’m going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal – but I sometimes have to put myself in other people’s shoes.

Everything that enlarges the sphere of human powers, that shows man he can do what he thought he could not do, is valuable.

I’m a genetic optimist.

Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me is a matter of profound wonder.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

A lot of times, people feel that if they forgive the person who hurt them, then they will continue to take advantage of them or not take responsibility for what they did wrong.

Life cannot be without relationship, but we have made it so agonizing and hideous by basing it on personal and possessive love. Can one love and yet not possess? You will find the true answer not in escape, ideals, beliefs but through the understanding of the causes of dependence and possessiveness.

I say what I want to say and do what I want to do. There’s no in between. People will either love you for it or hate you for it.

The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosopher’s or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself, and that is why you must know yourself – Immaturity lies only in total ignorance of self.

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

Intense feeling too often obscures the truth.

I have learned not to worry about love; but to honor its coming with all my heart.

We boil at different degrees.

My experience has been that work is almost the best way to pull oneself out of the depths.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

All my life I’ve been taught how to die, but no one ever taught me how to grow old.

Always fall in with what you’re asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever’s going. Not against: with.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.

I went through a lot of battles in high school.

One thing I want to make clear, as far as my own rebirth is concerned, the final authority is myself and no one else, and obviously not China’s Communists.

Enemies are so stimulating.

Peace in the world starts with peace in oneself. If everyone lives mindfully, everyone will be more healthy, feel more fulfilled in their daily lives and there will be more peace.

When I look back over my life it’s almost as if there was a plan laid out for me – from the little girl who was so passionate about animals who longed to go to Africa and whose family couldn’t afford to put her through college. Everyone laughed at my dreams. I was supposed to be a secretary in Bournemouth.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

So many people live with anger and unforgiveness, and many of them are Christians.

I can’t tell anybody else how to run their life or their business, but I really believe I’ve got a good bead on myself.

Lots of songs aren’t even from my experiences, but they’re about accepting… the dark things about yourself.

The best book, like the best speech, will do it all – make us laugh, think, cry and cheer – preferably in that order.

I made a commitment to completely cut out drinking and anything that might hamper me from getting my mind and body together. And the floodgates of goodness have opened upon me – spiritually and financially.

I lost some of my friends because I got so famous, people who just assumed that I would be different now. I felt like everyone hated me. That is the most unhappy time of my life.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

As I’m traveling around, I meet many small children. And when I look at a small and think how we’ve harmed this beautiful planet since I was that age, I feel a kind of desperation, anger, shame. I don’t know what I feel; I just don’t know what the emotion is.

Vulnerability is the birthplace of connection and the path to the feeling of worthiness. If it doesn’t feel vulnerable, the sharing is probably not constructive.

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time.