My affection for Taiwan… is witnessed by everyone. My wife is Taiwanese and I am a son-in-law of Taiwan. I am half Taiwanese.

The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it – aliens.

I hate being called an ‚icon.‘ I just don’t like it. That’s all there is to it.

I’m always cast in these strange men… that’s not me, really.

Me, as a person, I grow. I’m like a chameleon. You know? That is a gift and a curse for me. But more so a gift, because it never puts me in a box.

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

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.

I haven’t changed at all. I’m the same as when I was 11.

Because I’m small, I’ve been called things from ‚Happy Feet‘ to ‚Little Face.‘

Robyn is who I am. Rihanna – that’s an idea of who I am.

It’s a very strange thing being recognized or looked upon as someone special.

I always was a Christian… whatsoever a man thinks in his heart is who he is.

My music seems to have a bigger mission than I have, which is very soothing but also very strange because people see more in me than I see, which can be terrifying.

I would never say I was an icon, but so many people have said I am, so I suppose I am. I mean, I can’t not be what everyone says I am. But I don’t feel like an icon.

Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

Thoughts are fine when you don’t confuse them with who you are, and then thoughts are not a problem. Thinking is a wonderful tool to create things in this world. It only becomes problematic and a source of suffering when you confuse thinking with who you are.

What good is it being Marilyn Monroe? Why can’t I just be an ordinary woman?

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

At twelve I looked like a girl of seventeen. My body was developed and shapely. I still wore the blue dress and the blouse the orphanage provided. They made me look like an overgrown lummox.

I never have really become accustomed to the ‚John.‘ Nobody ever really calls me John… I’ve always been Duke or Marion or John Wayne. It’s a name that goes well together, and it’s like one word – John Wayne.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.

I once wanted to prove myself by being a great actress. Now I want to prove that I’m a person. Then maybe I’ll be a great actress.

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

A sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate to be a thing.

China is a great manufacturing center, but it’s actually mostly an assembly plant. So it assembles parts and components, high technology that comes from the surrounding industrial – more advanced industrial centers – Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, the United States, Europe – and it basically assembles them.

I just dress like… I’m an old black man. Sorry! Like I’m an old Jewish black man. I just dress like it’s still the ’50s.

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

Bob Marley isn’t my name. I don’t even know my name yet.

The work is the work. The work is not me.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

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

My purpose is to help people look at themselves and begin to shift their concepts. Remember, we are not our country, our race, or religion. We are eternal spirits. Seeing ourselves as spiritual beings without label is a way to transform the world and reach a sacred place for all of humanity.

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

I am what I am. A fighter.

There was a while when I was feeling like, ‚Damn, if I’d just been born black, I would not have to go through all this‘.

I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, ‚black feminist‘ does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it’s just… womanish.

Such as we are made of, such we be.

What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you’re hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

For people who may think they know, or have snippets of who I am, you can attack that person. That’s part of being a public figure.

My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‚blackness‘ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don’t belong.

I don’t know what ‚normal‘ means, anyway.

I started being really proud of the fact that I was gay even though I wasn’t.

I don’t see myself as a pop artist. Like, when you hear ‚pop,‘ you’re like, ‚Oh, bubblegum, jumpy little girly stuff,‘ and I feel like, ‚Uh-uh. That’s not me.‘

We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; we have no place to go.

We are braver and wiser because they existed, those strong women and strong men… We are who we are because they were who they were. It’s wise to know where you come from, who called your name.

I don’t really regard myself as a political figure.

Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.

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.

If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.

Everybody always laughs because I feel so much more comfortable with, like, a giant paper bag on my whole body and paint on my face. Sometimes I try really hard to take it all off. But inevitably what’s underneath is still not a straight edge. And I don’t think it ever will be.

In my research, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who never fit in, who are what you might call ‚different‘: scientists, artists, thinkers. And if you drop down deep into their work and who they are, there is a tremendous amount of self-acceptance.

‚They‘ is… stay away from them, please. There is so many different definitions of ‚they.‘ You might have a personal ‚they.‘ They against you; they want you broken and miserable. They don’t like winners; they don’t like people who’s blessed. So everybody’s got a different ‚they.‘

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.

I am not part of the problem. I am a Republican.

I can’t disguise myself with a wig and dark glasses – the wheelchair gives me away.

When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity – what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.