It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution.

Fear is the mother of morality.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.

As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into Heaven, into Hell.

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

As long as your body is healthy and under control and death is distant, try to save your soul; when death is immanent what can you do?

I’ve got a woman’s ability to stick to a job and get on with it when everyone else walks off and leaves it.

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

No sanction can stand against ignited minds.

Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

Such is the feebleness of humanity, such is its perversity, that doubtless it is better for it to be subject to all possible superstitions, as long as they are not murderous, than to live without religion.

Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.

Life is warfare.

There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

Folks, I can tell you I’ve known eight presidents, three of them intimately.

I am prepared to resort to anything, to submit to anything, for the sake of the commonwealth.

There will be days when I walk in an arena and people will cheer and then there might be days when I walk in an arena and people might boo, but it all sounds the same to me because it’s all just noise that lets me know that I’m relevant.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

The fame isn’t important to me. It’s a blessing to have. Having so many people that support me, that love me and listen to my music, is beautiful.

You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

About the time we can make the ends meet, somebody moves the ends.

How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?

I had noticed that many of these successful people, historical and contemporary, shared certain common traits. They had a way of thinking that was exceptionally fluid; they could adapt to almost any circumstance; when confronted with problems, they could look at them from novel perspectives and solve them.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

Living in America and, of course, just being women in general, we’ve got more strength than we think we do.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

Adopt responsibility for your own well-being, try to put your family together, try to serve your community, try to seek for eternal truth… That’s the sort of thing that can ground you in your life, enough so that you can withstand the difficulty of life.

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.

A man is but the product of his thoughts, what he thinks he becomes.

To appreciate the noble is a gain which can never be torn from us.

To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one’s landlady.

The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it.

From my close observation of writers… they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!

You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet.

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice… that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.

I was in a terrible mess in my childhood.

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

There’s people that tried to celebrate when I lost that got nothing to do with it. That’s not the sign of a champion.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

I hope when I’m dead I’ll be considered an icon, though.

People in Latin America… love America from afar and emulate America in some ways but also hate a lot of things that America does to them.