Kitchens are hard environments and they form incredibly strong characters.

One mustn’t close one’s eyes to difficulty and to shortcomings; the more one recognizes them, the less they upset one.

In my entire life, any time I’ve ever lost something, I’ve gotten something even better going around the next corner. It’s like one door closes and another door opens. As long as I can walk through the produce section in every grocery store in this country and eat the grapes that they’re going to throw away, I know I can be fine.

Character is formed in the stormy billows of the world.

I can take it. The tougher it gets, the cooler I get.

We should not moor a ship with one anchor, or our life with one hope.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

It’s never paid to bet against America. We come through things, but its not always a smooth ride.

Those people in New York are not gonna change me none.

Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.

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.

My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.

The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience.

Any of us can be happy and have a good attitude when everything is going our way. But I believe it’s the real test of your character and of your faith to say, ‚Things are not going our way, but I’m still being good to people; I’m still attending church; I still have a good attitude.‘

My mom had Julia Child and ‚The Fannie Farmer Cookbook‘ on top of the refrigerator, and she had a small repertoire of French dishes.

My mother, I suppose, is still a main figure in my life because her life was so sad and unfair, and she so brave, but also because she was determined to make me into the Sunday-school-recitation little girl I was, from the age of seven or so, fighting not to be.

I don’t believe in the school of hard knocks, although I’ve had them. All that stuff about whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger is so not true. Do you know what makes you stronger? When people treat you and your art with dignity.

My mom cleaned toilets for a long time, and she’d seen a lot of terrible things, but she was still the strength of our family. And there are women like that all across the country – all around the world – who show that type of fortitude.

People in tough times – it doesn’t mean they don’t have a great attitude.

Live as brave men; and if fortune is adverse, front its blows with brave hearts.

Experience is not what happens to you; it’s what you do with what happens to you.

A wounded deer leaps the highest.

I don’t lose any sleep at night over the potential for failure. I cannot even spell the word.

The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in the world.

One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.

We will all fail in life, but nobody has to be a failure. Failing at a thing doesn’t make you a failure. You are only a failure when you quit trying.

Adversity leads us to think properly of our state, and so is most beneficial to us.

Most of us aren’t defeated in one decisive battle. We are defeated one tiny, seemingly insignificant surrender at a time that chips away at who we should really be.

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

Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

When you’re in hell, you forget how great you really are because you’re suffering and you forget the great things you’ve done.

The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.

Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.

I am sure there’s going to be times when I do things wrong that no one’s going to like and everyone’s going to think I’m terrible and rubbish but I know I’m going to go through those times, and it’s just about understanding that that’s going to happen.

When I was 8 years old I became a mute and was a mute until I was 13, and I thought of my whole body as an ear, so I can go into a crowd and sit still and absorb all sound. That talent or ability has lasted and served me until today.

Never give in – never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.

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.

Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I’m taking with me when I go.

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

I’ve had no contact with my daughter for years. That’s her choice. Anyway, you move on. If people don’t want to bother with me, fine. You know, God bless them, and move on.

A warrior is not a person that carries a gun. The biggest war you ever go through is right between your own ears. It’s in your mind. We’re all going through a war in our mind, and we have to callus our mind to fight that war and to win that war.

Yeah, I wasn’t chosen to be first. I was just chosen to command that flight. Circumstance put me in that particular role. That wasn’t planned by anyone.

During bad circumstances, which is the human inheritance, you must decide not to be reduced. You have your humanity, and you must not allow anything to reduce that. We are obliged to know we are global citizens. Disasters remind us we are world citizens, whether we like it or not.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.

I once told Nixon that the Presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hail storm. You’ve got to just stand there and take it.

Hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible.

The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.

I grew up in the east side of Detroit in an area where there was very little, except for a lot of scarcity, poverty and hunger. I never woke up saying, ‚I’m an orphan again today, isn’t this terrible? Poor me.‘

I got the stern end of the stick. It was kind of that iron fist. I am who I am today because of my mother.

I am the most unselfish chef in Britain today.

Over the years I’ve seen people lose a spouse and then withdraw and lose interest in life, and I believe we need to resist that.

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.

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

You’ll never find a better sparring partner than adversity.