People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.

I’ve made my share of mistakes along the way, but if I have changed even one life for the better, I haven’t lived in vain.

If you don’t like what you’re doing, then don’t do it.

At first, I was scared to show fear because you can never be sure how people will perceive you. But I dared myself to do that, to stand out. Now I’ll talk about being beaten up or robbed or making a stupid decision because of a girl or whatever.

Because my dad abused me, I was determined to never let a man tell me what to do. God clearly showed me that I needed to be a submissive wife if I wanted to be effective in ministry. The truth is, if we don’t learn to submit to authority, we won’t ever learn to submit to God.

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

As I get older, I tend to put more into family than I used to.

Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don’t let yourself believe it will happen to you.

I’m happy being myself, which I’ve never been before. I always hid in other people, or tried to find myself through the characters, or live out their lives, but I didn’t have those things in mine.

I invented my life by taking for granted that everything I did not like would have an opposite, which I would like.

The finest steel has to go through the hottest fire.

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

A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body – the wishbone.

Hollywood is not suited for me, and I am not suited for it.

It’s hard to be clear about who you are when you are carrying around a bunch of baggage from the past. I’ve learned to let go and move more quickly into the next place.

Mothers and daughters generally have fairly complex relationships, and ours was made much more so by Mother’s illness. She had Parkinson’s disease, which was not diagnosed for a long time… All that made me very self-protective, because for one thing, I didn’t want to get trapped.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

The thing I always say to people is this: ‚If you avoid failure, you also avoid success.‘

Vulnerability is basically uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.

If I could give you information of my life, it would be to show how a woman of very ordinary ability has been led by God in strange and unaccustomed paths to do In His service what He has done in her. And if I could tell you all, you would see how God has done all, and I nothing.

The trained mind is a rich mind.

Even when we have physical hardships, we can be very happy.

I was hit by a car once on my bike, but I still rode home.

If you’ve lost your spirit, even living in the richest country in the world can’t help you become rich.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

My show ‚The Big House‘ was picked up; they flew me to New York. I’m about to step on stage to announce Kevin Hart’s ‚The Big House.‘ And a hand grabs my shoulder, ‚Kevin no, they just decided to cancel it.‘ It’s a serious smack-in-the-face business, and either you can take it, or you can’t.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.

Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.

Plenty of people wish to become devout, but no one wishes to be humble.

It is a man’s own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

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

Sometimes in the past when I played something might make me lose focus, or I would go home after a game where I thought I could have played better and I would let it hang over my head for a long time when it shouldn’t.

I walk tall; I got a tall attitude.

We all have two lives: an inner life and an outer life. Your inner life is your soul life, which includes your mind, will and emotions. Your outer life is your physical life. And while God cares about every detail of your life, He is more concerned with your inner life than your outer life.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

I was raised to be an independent woman, not the victim of anything.

Whatever you are, be a good one.

I want to challenge you today to get out of your comfort zone. You have so much incredible potential on the inside. God has put gifts and talents in you that you probably don’t know anything about.

I think, when you are growing up, you have to pull apart from what your mother wants or needs. You’ve got to go your own way, and that’s what I did.

First ask yourself: What is the worst that can happen? Then prepare to accept it. Then proceed to improve on the worst.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what’s going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

It is better to do one’s own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins.

The best part about being in your thirties is you know what works for you.

Perhaps it is better to be irresponsible and right, than to be responsible and wrong.

Key is never be afraid of being yourself. Never!

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.

I will praise any man that will praise me.

As long as I’m learning something, I figure I’m OK – it’s a decent day.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

The time when most of you should withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

It’s physical. If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong.

I want to believe that I am improving. This is something that I take really seriously.

True happiness arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one’s self, and in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.

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

Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.

Weak character will neutralize all of the other possible good qualities a person might possess.