The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance.

No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married.

When you find a guy who is powerful, a big father figure, you latch onto him immediately.

My greatest blessing has been the birth of my son. My next greatest blessing has been my ability to turn people into children of mine.

If someone you know makes a bad decision or uses bad judgment, it doesn’t mean you have to allow that to alter your attitude. Why should you allow anyone else’s bad decisions to send you into a tailspin of misery?

The Tao teaches us not to intervene and interfere. The things we love we have to learn to leave alone. And the people we love we have to learn to let them be.

I always say this about my music, and music in general: Music is like a time capsule. Each album reflects what I’m going through or what’s going on in my life at that moment.

I like some animals more than some people, some people more than some animals.

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

It doesn’t matter how long my hair is or what colour my skin is or whether I’m a woman or a man.

Instead of judging people, we need to pray.

When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out.

No work or love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart, just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

It’s not about changing people; it’s sometimes about changing a situation. How can we build an even better situation for them?

Things do not always happen the way I would like them to happen, and I had better get used to that.

It’s no accident many accuse me of conducting public affairs with my heart instead of my head. Well, what if I do? Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.

Marriage is a school itself. Also, having children. Becoming a father changed my whole life. It taught me as if by revelation.

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

I think there is a lot made out of age, and what age you feel.

Of what use is a philosopher who doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings?

I let people fill in the blanks on their own. If they want to think about their ex, that’s fine. If they want to think about maybe who one of my exes is, then that’s fine. And it might not be right, because I’m the only one who knows what these songs are really about. It’s the one shred of privacy I have in the matter.

I love food.

It is our choices… that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.

He who cannot give anything away cannot feel anything either.

All of our problems start in our minds.

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

I never looked at my mantel and envisioned an MVP trophy sitting there. This is pretty crazy.

I never do anything that I don’t want to do.

People like music when they’re in love, but they don’t need it as much. You need music when you’re missing someone or you’re pining for someone or you’re forgetting someone or you’re trying to process what just happened.

Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow.

I imagine I will be less involved in film and be focused more on family and foreign affairs.

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

It’s not a slam at you when people are rude, it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.

Love is a serious mental disease.

I don’t let even a day go by wherein I don’t give at 100 per cent.

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.

Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God’s final word on where your lips end.

People were saying that David Geffen and I had gotten married and it just blew me away. Not that they thought I was gay, but that they thought I could land a guy that hot.

I’m fat, but I’m thin inside… there’s a thin man inside every fat man.

A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of friends.

Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.

I’m one of the world’s most self-conscious people. I really have to struggle.

I don’t want to make money; I want to make a difference.

To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother, is not something I could forgive. I could not look at myself in the morning if I did that. I wouldn’t be attracted to a man who would cheat on his wife.

We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.

I feel matured in a way that I’m happy about. I’m at this other stage in my life – and it’s not a bad thing at all.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

If I held you any closer I would be on the other side of you.

It creeps me out sometimes to think of the person I was. I was a terrible person. I was mean to people.

Every seven years, I sit down and make a whole new plan.

Pretension is a poor joke that you play on yourself. Snap out of it. Recognise your strengths, work on your weaknesses. Real achievement is liking what you see in the mirror every morning.

Always kiss your children goodnight, even if they’re already asleep.

One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

As a sportsperson, the best thing is people recognising you and loving you for what you do. For me, glamour is 100 people in the hotel feeling happy to see you.

There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.

Sometimes our light goes out but is blown into flame by another human being. Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light.

If you’re going to be a winner in life, you have to constantly go beyond your best.

I love America, it’s a much more permissive place.

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

Everything negative – pressure, challenges – is all an opportunity for me to rise.