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

Two such as you with such a master speed, cannot be parted nor be swept away, from one another once you are agreed, that life is only life forevermore, together wing to wing and oar to oar.

Although the circumstances of our lives may seem very disengaged, with me standing here as the First Lady of the United States of America and you just getting through school, I want you to know we have very much in common. For nothing in my life ever would have predicted that I would be standing here as the first African-American First Lady.

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

Here’s the thing: every office I’ve run for I was the first to win. First person of color. First woman. First woman of color. Every time.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

If selfishness is the key to being miserable, then selflessness must be the key to being happy!

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

The man who makes everything that leads to happiness depends upon himself, and not upon other men, has adopted the very best plan for living happily. This is the man of moderation, the man of manly character and of wisdom.

Do everything as in the eye of another.

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.

Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman’s normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.

I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.

In every parting there is an image of death.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.

The bird is powered by its own life and by its motivation.

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence.

People who bowl vote. Bowlers are not the cultural elite.

Wondrous is the strength of cheerfulness, and its power of endurance – the cheerful man will do more in the same time, will do it; better, will preserve it longer, than the sad or sullen.

The Christian religion, though scattered and abroad will in the end gather itself together at the foot of the cross.

My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.

I think that, whatever happens, I’m just happy I’ve written those songs and I’ve made an album. That’s really big for me, and I’m proud of that.

You can be a rank insider as well as a rank outsider.

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.

Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.

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.

To try to become happy is to try to build a machine with no other specifications than it shall run noiselessly.

With compassion you can die for other people, like the mother who can die for her child. You have the courage to say it because you are not afraid of losing anything, because you know that understanding and love is the foundation of happiness. But if you have fear of losing your status, your position, you will not have the courage to do it.

Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine.

Let’s be very clear: Strong men – men who are truly role models – don’t need to put down women to make themselves feel powerful. People who are truly strong lift others up. People who are truly powerful bring others together.

There is no room for military people, including our veterans, to see themselves as victims, even if so many of our countrymen are prone to relish that role.

I live in a crazy time.

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

Life is a dead-end street.

The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.

There is always a present and extant life, be it better or worse, which all combine to uphold.

Many interviewers when they come to talk to me, think they’re being progressive by not mentioning in their stories any longer that I’m black. I tell them, ‚Don’t stop now. If I shot somebody you’d mention it.‘

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

I have been aware all the time that my peoples, spread far and wide throughout every continent and ocean in the world, were united to support me in the task to which I have now been dedicated with such solemnity.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

‚Pure experience‘ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

In that film, the man and the part met. As far as I’m concerned, that part is Greg’s for life. I’ve had many, many offers to turn it into musicals, into TV or stage plays, but I’ve always refused.

There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November.

We boil at different degrees.

I like to make people feel happy and superior in their reaction towards my appearance.

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

The two things in the world we all share in this world are laughter and pain. We’ve all got problems. The levels of those problems vary, but we’ve all got problems. When you can take things that are painful and make them funny, that’s a gift – to you and your audience.

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

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

No one but a fool is always right.