Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get.

Anxiety and spiritual searching have been consistent themes with me, and that figures into my worldview. But I tend to make my songs sound like relationship songs.

I do not like broccoli. And I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m President of the United States and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli.

Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

Women will only have true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.

Tell the children the truth.

Men are what their mothers made them.

I mean… in life… what relationship is easy?

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.

I have noticed… that men usually leave married women alone and are inclined to treat all wives with respect. This is no great credit to married women.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

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

Actors are one family over the entire world.

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don’t think anyone in my family would really feel I’d done them an injustice by saying that. We didn’t see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

Homework’s hard. Especially math. My kids joke with me. They tell me they have homework. I say, ‚Okay.‘ And then I sit down and they say, ‚It’s math.‘ ‚No! Not math! English, history, anything!‘

I make decisions all day, so it’s nice for a woman like me to go to dinner and have the man take the menu and say, ‚Let me order.‘ Other women would be offended by that, but I’m like, ‚Good. Because I can’t make one more decision today.‘ I want someone to rub my feet without being asked.

If I ever had twins, I’d use one for parts.

You can write a song about being in love with someone, but you don’t have to be in love with anyone.

I seldom think of politics more than eighteen hours a day.

I’ve never had a dislike for men. I’ve been badly treated by some. But I’ve been loved greatly by some. I married a lot of them.

There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It is a thing no married man knows anything about.

There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls, but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd. Of course, I expect this, but the knife still cuts.

If you think nobody cares about you, try missing a couple of payments.

Standing in support of children is something we should all be able to get behind, regardless of party affiliation.

We do not so much need the help of our friends as the confidence of their help in need.

Arthur Miller wouldn’t have married me if I had been nothing but a dumb blonde.

Never be the only one, except, possibly, in your own home.

It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.

Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.

Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing.

There is just no comparison between having a dinner date with a man and staying home playing canasta with the girls.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

Sometimes you can’t prioritise family and you feel guilty.

I’m blessed to have such a tight-knit family that we can talk about anything. Whether we talk frequently or not, since we’re on separate ends of the country, there are a lot of moving parts, and we always stay tight and find that center ground that keeps us together.

Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!

When I was younger, I was testing myself and questioning everything, but now it’s less about that and more about these are the years of my life with my family.

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

The closest I ever came to getting married was just before I started singing. In fact, my first record saved my neck.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

As I got older, my pops tried to keep me involved with the culture by telling me the stories of the conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea, how he came to America, and about our family back home, because all that side of my family – my aunties, grandparents – is in Africa.

I’ve never been pregnant, so I just feel God didn’t mean for me to have kids so that everybody else’s children could be mine.

I’m more of an adventurous type than a relationship type.

If you’ve ever hauled a 28-pound two-year-old around New York, you’ll find that men fold at the knees a lot quicker than women.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men, while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes himself get good things by jealousy, while the other does not allow his neighbour to have them through envy.

And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.

In order to have friends, you must first be one.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

We’re all bombarded with so many dietary messages that it’s hard to find time to sort through all this information, but we do have time to take a look at our kids‘ plates.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.

I like to write about love and love lost because I feel like there are so many different subcategories of emotions that you can possibly delve into.

I don’t pretend we have all the answers. But the questions are certainly worth thinking about.

I wear a hat on stage so that people won’t be blinded by the reflection from my head. Also, if I don’t wear a hat, there’s no way that the hat can be at that level by itself on the stage.

The more you stay in this kind of job, the more you realize that a public figure, a major public figure, is a lonely man.

Doing Saturday Night Live definitely affects my relationship with my girlfriend and with my family, because you feel so much pressure to do well that night. But I think everyone’s grown to accept that and so they give me my space at the show.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.