Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.

My number one thing? Don’t overleverage yourself. Don’t say you can do something when you really can’t.

We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

Indeed, it is as important to learn how to receive a blessing as it is to be willing to give one.

To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.

The more successful I become, the more I need a man.

Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.

Let us not forget who we are. Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is.

Do the thing you fear to do and keep on doing it… that is the quickest and surest way ever yet discovered to conquer fear.

I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.

Some like to think that a keen appreciation of art can actually make us better people – more just, more moral, more sensitive, more understanding. Perhaps that is true – in certain rare, isolated cases.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

Your entire life only happens in this moment. The present moment is life itself. Yet, people live as if the opposite were true and treat the present moment as a stepping stone to the next moment – a means to an end.

If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.

If you deny people their own voice, you’ll have no idea of who they were.

I’m considered wise, and sometimes I see myself as knowing. Most of the time, I see myself as wanting to know. And I see myself as a very interested person. I’ve never been bored in my life.

For most of us, wisdom is acquired in the thicket of experience and usually meets us somewhere along the way if we live long enough. But sooner is better than later.

Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.

I can’t read the newspaper without crying. I’m easily affected by horrible events, you see.

Your life will be a blessed and balanced experience if you first honor your identity and priority.

Your body has space within you that cannot die.

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line, banishment from all the living, and tend to do what I then did – which was to hide.

Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid, one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.

Hide our ignorance as we will, an evening of wine soon reveals it.

It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.

The problem with having a sense of humor is often that people you use it on aren’t in a very good mood.

When one has not had a good father, one must create one.

There are so many emotions that you’re feeling, you can get stifled by them if you’re feeling them all at once. What I try to do is take one moment – one simple, simple feeling – and expand it into three-and-a-half minutes.

If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked.

The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: ‚If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?‘ But… the good Samaritan reversed the question: ‚If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?‘

I worked out early on to give up things I couldn’t do well at all.

I’m not frightened of appearing vulnerable.

I was never focused on me, me, me all the time. I was always focused on somebody else.

Egotism is the source and summary of all faults and miseries.

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

I brought myself down. I impeached myself by resigning.

I think it’s my responsibility, as a person of influence… to sometimes try to do what I can.

Generosity is not giving me that which I need more than you do, but it is giving me that which you need more than I do.

I was so rude when I was a little girl.

Courageous people do not fear forgiving, for the sake of peace.

I try to not focus on what people expect from me.

I’ve never professed to be anything but an average student.

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.

As a leader, the first person I need to lead is me. The first person that I should try to change is me.

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.

Knowledge cultivates your seeds and does not sow in your seeds.

The Nation of Islam’s main focus was teaching black pride and self-awareness. Why should we keep trying to force ourselves into white restaurants and schools when white people didn’t want us? Why not clean up our own neighborhoods and schools instead of trying to move out of them and into white people’s neighborhoods?

I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously and unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources and the difficulty of my life… I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a vagabond.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

Many years ago, I concluded that a few hair shirts were part of the mental wardrobe of every man. The president differs from other men in that he has a more extensive wardrobe.

We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another – until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

I’ll never, ever be full. I’ll always be hungry. Obviously, I’m not talking about food. Growing up, I had nothing for such a long time. Someone told me a long time ago, and I’ve never forgotten it, ‚Once you’ve ever been hungry, really, really hungry, then you’ll never, ever be full.‘

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

To do all that one is able to do, is to be a man; to do all that one would like to do, is to be a god.

Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated.