On the other hand, you have different fingers.

Too many people measure how successful they are by how much money they make or the people that they associate with. In my opinion, true success should be measured by how happy you are.

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.

For me, there are two types of people: the young and the experienced.

There are definitely people who disagree with certain creative decisions you make. Pleasing everyone is pretty hard.

Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.

If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

A good thing to remember is somebody’s got it a lot worse than we do.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

Sooner or later we’re all someone’s dog.

I’m a really particular person. I want it my way.

You have to understand that people that are hurting are going to criticize.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.

Reality simply consists of different points of view.

It’s absolutely normal that different human beings want to go different ways.

There is nothing insignificant in the world. It all depends on the point of view.

This isn’t life in the fast lane, it’s life in the oncoming traffic.

There are many things that happen every day that we could murmur about if we let ourselves go there. But they really aren’t worth the effort it takes to get upset and gripe about it.

I know a lot of athletes and models are written off as just bodies. I never felt used for my body.

I specifically did not read other First Ladies‘ books, because I didn’t want to be influenced by how they defined the role. I knew that I would have to find this role – very uniquely and specifically to me and who I was.

Avoid popularity if you would have peace.

Some days I totally appreciate everything that’s happening to me, and some days I feel everyone’s waiting for me to mess up.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

Hip-hop is ever changing but you’ll always have the pack. And you’ll always have those people who are separated from the pack.

Players today moan about the number of games, but when you’re young, you can’t play enough.

Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.

We usually lose today, because there has been a yesterday, and tomorrow is coming.

The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you – black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

Don’t try to be like Jackie. There is only one Jackie. Study computers instead.

A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer’s hand.

In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane.

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.

The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down.

I tend to believe that audiences are relatively well-balanced people.

I don’t think there’s anything unique about human intelligence.

Life is a song to me.

All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

Pakistan is not a unified country.

Older people sit down and ask, ‚What is it?‘ but the boy asks, ‚What can I do with it?‘.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

The media need superheroes in science just as in every sphere of life, but there is really a continuous range of abilities with no clear dividing line.

You may make some mistakes – but that doesn’t make you a sinner. You’ve got the very nature of God on the inside of you.

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.

You can be happy where you are.

I’m more of a realist when it comes to life, and I’d much rather my mother be in a spiritual place in Heaven than in a bed, sick, fighting for her life.

I am just one human being.

All these walls that keep us from loving each other as one family or one race – racism, religion, where we grew up, whatever, class, socioeconomic – what makes us be so selfish and prideful, what keeps us from wanting to help the next man, what makes us be so focused on a personal legacy as opposed to the entire legacy of a race.

I think the whole stigma of ‚black movies‘ is slowly being lost. When you look at movies like ’12 Years A Slave,‘ to ‚The Butler,‘ to ‚The Best Man,‘ to ‚Ride Along,‘ to even ‚Think Like a Man‘ from last year – these movies are just good movies.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

I’m not big on flak jackets and tie-dyed shirts. You know, that’s not me.

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.

I don’t know if I’ve ever cared much what others think.