No woman ever hates a man for being in love with her, but many a woman hate a man for being a friend to her.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women… no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.

In each soul, God loves and partly saves the whole world which that soul sums up in an incommunicable and particular way.

I don’t know what’s better gettin‘ laid or gettin‘ paid.

Know your worth! People always act like they’re doing more for you than you’re doing for them.

My father was a mean, controlling and manipulative person for most of his life. He was unpredictable and unstable.

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

Test a servant while in the discharge of his duty, a relative in difficulty, a friend in adversity, and a wife in misfortune.

Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone I love not to mix with it.

Remember, it’s as easy to marry a rich woman as a poor woman.

At the end of the day, we started playing football because we loved it.

I approach love differently now that I know it’s hard for it to work out.

Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.

The key to winning is choosing to do God’s will and loving others with all you’ve got.

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.

All you need to do to be my friend is like me.

‚Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.

Kids who have an understanding of how and why their feelings are what they are are much more likely to talk to us about what’s happening, and they have better skills to work it out.

I know I’m talented, but I wasn’t put here to sing. I was put here to be a wife and a mom and look after my family. I love what I do, but it’s not where it begins and ends.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

Even now I will go to, like, an industry event, and all the ladies will be over here and all the guys over here, and I will go to the guys‘ table and sit because I just feel I can have a much better conversation over there. And that’s automatic; it’s not prejudice.

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.

I learned a great many years ago that in a fight between husband and wife, a third party should never get between the woman’s skillet and the man’s ax-helve.

When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.

Do good to your friends to keep them, to your enemies to win them.

One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.

Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.

I left Mainz after 18 years and thought, ‚Next time, I will work with a little less of my heart.‘ I said that because we all cried for a week. The city gave us a goodbye party, and it lasted a week.

It is natural for the mind to believe and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false.

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

There are strings in the human heart that had better not be vibrated.

The fact is that people are good, Give people affection and security, and they will give affection and be secure in their feelings and their behavior.

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.

Every once in a while I get the highly inappropriate proposal which is like, ‚Wow, Really! You don’t even know me and I don’t know you at all, and you want that to happen? Tonight? Ok, I get off work at 7.30.‘

A lot of times, people make other people responsible for their joy: ‚You’re not making me happy, you’re not doing this, you’re not doing that.‘

Often people become our friend or follower with an undercurrent of resentment in our having more success than they have. They secretly desire the opportunity to take us down a notch; they have a nose for any misstep on our part they can exploit.

When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory.

I don’t feel that I’m explaining the world or teaching people anything. And I’m not trying to be a mirror, showing them what’s really going on the world. All I’m trying to do is think of stuff that’s funny, just like when I’m kidding around with my friends.

If your mom cries a lot, you probably cry a lot. It’s what you learn.

It used to be the case, like you’d switch jobs, and then maybe you wouldn’t keep in touch with all the people that you knew from that old job, just because it was too hard. But one of the things that Facebook does is it makes it really easy to just stay in touch with all these people.

We’re close friends – the American people, the Israeli people, our governments. There’s absolutely no daylight – none – between us and the Israelis on the question of Israel’s security.

The rule of friendship means there should be mutual sympathy between them, each supplying what the other lacks and trying to benefit the other, always using friendly and sincere words.

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.

Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hunger gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there’s time, the Bastard Time.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

My whole life and my whole career, even through my music, I tell people: let’s unify; let’s show more love.

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.

You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s.

No matter what, I always make it home for Christmas. I love to go to my Tennessee Mountain Home and invite all of my nieces and nephews and their spouses and kids and do what we all like to do – eat, laugh, trade presents and just enjoy each other… and sometimes I even dress up like Santa Claus!

Poverty breeds despair. We know this. Despair breeds violence. We know this. In turbulent times, isn’t it cheaper, and smarter, to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later?

Friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.

All happiness or unhappiness solely depends upon the quality of the object to which we are attached by love.

My mother was a full-time mother. She didn’t have much of her own career, her own life, her own experiences… everything was for her children. I will never be as good a mother as she was. She was just grace incarnate. She was the most generous, loving – she’s better than me.

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.