When I am getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say.

The capability of negotiating… is something that means you not only have to understand fully what you believe and what your national interests are but in order to be a really good negotiator, you have to try to figure out what the other person on the other side of the table has in mind.

Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.

I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

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 have trouble imagining what I could do that’s beyond the practicality of what I can do.

The thing to do, it seems to me, is to prepare yourself so you can be a rainbow in somebody else’s cloud. Somebody who may not look like you. May not call God the same name you call God – if they call God at all. I may not dance your dances or speak your language. But be a blessing to somebody. That’s what I think.

The people in my songs are all me.

I can express myself.

A man will speedily sit down and sympathize with a friend’s griefs, but if he sees him honored and esteemed, he is apt to regard him as a rival and does not so readily rejoice with him. This ought not to be; without effort, we ought to be happy in our brother’s happiness.

We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans – because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That’s why we paint, that’s why we dare to love someone – because we have the impulse to explain who we are.

Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us… While what we call ‚our own life‘ remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make ‚our own life‘ less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?

If you listen through the screen of your desires, then you obviously listen to your own voice; you are listening to your own desires.

Sometimes cameras and television are good to people and sometimes they aren’t. I don’t know if its the way you say it, or how you look.

The Army will take its lessons learned. They’re excellent at looking into themselves and reflecting on what did we do right, what did we do wrong.

Though silence is not necessarily an admission, it is not a denial, either.

If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.

A man is born alone and dies alone; and he experiences the good and bad consequences of his karma alone; and he goes alone to hell or the Supreme abode.

If thy brother wrongs thee, remember not so much his wrong-doing, but more than ever that he is thy brother.

I could talk all day, T stands for talking, T stands for tender, T stands for things that don’t even rhyme with T.

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

Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

Advertising works most effectively when it’s in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook – they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing – so there’s really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that.

My daughter doesn’t even get my humor. She’s like, ‚Um, no. I don’t get it, Dad. Mmm, no, not that one, Dad.‘

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.

I hope that Facebook and other Internet technologies were able to help people, just like we hope that we help them communicate and organize and do whatever they want to every single day, but I don’t pretend that if Facebook didn’t exist, that this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course, it would have.

I fear that many a man’s good resolutions only need the ordinary fire of daily life to make them melt away. So, too, with fine professions and the boastings of perfection which abound in this age of shams.

The mark of a true politician is that he is never at a loss for words because he is always half-expecting to be asked to make a speech.

My heroes don’t have anything special. They have something to tell other people but they don’t know how, so they talk to themselves.

Prayer is simply a two-way conversation between you and God.

A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?

If it’s going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

I change my mind a lot. I usually don’t agree with what I say very much. I’m an awful liar.

If you deny people their own voice, you’ll have no idea of who they were.

Too often in life, something happens and we blame other people for us not being happy or satisfied or fulfilled. So the point is, we all have choices, and we make the choice to accept people or situations or to not accept situations.

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.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

The American people are entitled to see the president and to hear his views directly, and not to see him only through the press.

Sitting on a bedroom floor crying is something that makes you feel really alone. If someone’s singing about that feeling, you feel bonded to that person.

Of course there are moments that you wonder how long you should be doing it because there are other aspects which are not nice, of this lifestyle. But I just love winning.

If I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.

Give thy thoughts no tongue.

When I talk to kids, I’m really listening. When I do that, we have a little bit of a bigger connection than me being Kendrick Lamar and you being a student. It’s almost like we’re friends. Because a friend listens.

The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.

The secret of being a bore… is to tell everything.

I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.

Brevity is a great charm of eloquence.

Please don’t ask me to do that which I’ve just said I’m not going to do, because you’re burning up time. The meter is running through the sand on you, and I am now filibustering.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.

Listen to many, speak to a few.

If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people, but I don’t regret having concerned myself with them because I think most of us are disturbed.

For a tear is quickly dried, especially when shed for the misfortunes of others.

I think it’s fair to say that personal computers have become the most empowering tool we’ve ever created. They’re tools of communication, they’re tools of creativity, and they can be shaped by their user.

I have an answering machine in my car. It says, I’m home now. But leave a message and I’ll call when I’m out.

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.

I used to stutter really badly. Everybody thinks it’s funny. And it’s not funny. It’s not.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

A man’s manners are a mirror in which he shows his portrait.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.