When I was a kid, I had a tendency to criticize. But when I did, my mum would whisk me off to the bathroom to stand in front of a mirror. Ten minutes, never less. To think about how criticism is a poor reflection on the one who criticizes.

I love our daughters more than anything in the world – more than life itself. And while that may not be the first thing that some folks want to hear from an Ivy-league-educated lawyer, it is truly who I am. So for me, being Mom-in-Chief is, and always will be, job number one.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

If you live only in one culture for the first 20 years of your life, you become conditioned without knowing it.

Do you know the only value life has is what life puts on itself?

The giving of love is an education in itself.

I never went to rock concerts when I was a kid. I didn’t see any rock & roll bands.

I hated the Naked Chef. Fine, yes, he did good things for school food or whatever, but, you know, I don’t want my chefs to be cute and adorable.

I made a commitment to completely cut out drinking and anything that might hamper me from getting my mind and body together. And the floodgates of goodness have opened upon me – spiritually and financially.

The ‚Billionaire‘ song is what my kids tease me with. They sing it to me. It’s funny.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

Knowledge is knowing that we cannot know.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

I’m an introvert somewhat. There could be a room full of people, I’ll go stand in the corner.

There is a need for aloneness, which I don’t think most people realise for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you.

Everything is an open book. I don’t speak on other people’s hardship, but if it happened in my life or something that has been an experience on my particular journey, I’m going to talk about it. That’s what my fan base appreciates the most. I’m universal. You can relate to the things I say or that I go through.

I tend not to like an awful lot of what is going out under my name now because it is just all product. Who needs it?

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

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.

Try and leave this world a little better than you found it, and when your turn comes to die, you can die happy in feeling that at any rate, you have not wasted your time but have done your best.

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence – beginning with one’s own.

Have you not learned that strength comes to an ordinary soul when given an extraordinary calling?

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

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

I want people to draw strength from me.

The formation of one’s character ought to be everyone’s chief aim.

I love everything about my job, except being away from the kids.

What I have in common with the character in ‚Truman‘ is this incredible need to please people. I feel like I want to take care of everyone and I also feel this terrible guilt if I am unable to. And I have felt this way ever since all this success started.

When your mother asks, ‚Do you want a piece of advice?‘ it is a mere formality. It doesn’t matter if you answer yes or no. You’re going to get it anyway.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.

I like criticism. It makes you strong.

Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.

Every one of my regrets has produced a song I’m proud of.

I’m not an analyzer. I’ve got a son that analyzes everything and everybody. But I don’t analyze people.

In the child, consciousness rises out of the depths of unconscious psychic life, at first like separate islands, which gradually unite to form a ‚continent,‘ a continuous landmass of consciousness. Progressive mental development means, in effect, extension of consciousness.

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.

Only by contending with challenges that seem to be beyond your strength to handle at the moment you can grow more surely toward the stars.

Early on in my life, I had a broken soul. I was abused by my father, abandoned by my mother and ended up in a destructive first marriage. By the time I was 23, I was broken in my soul. I didn’t know how to think right. I felt wrong about everything. But God stepped into my life, and I came out on the other side and didn’t even smell like smoke.

The work is the work. The work is not me.

We make the Sabbath a delight when we teach the gospel to our children.

I wish they would only take me as I am.

I always had faith in my creative capacity.

When you seek the presence of your creative Spirit and are filled with passion about virtually everything you undertake, you’ll successfully remove the roadblocks from your life and enjoy the active presence of Spirit.

They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.

In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.

I love to dance, but my children tell me I shouldn’t. Can’t see why.

Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

It’s stasis that kills you off in the end, not ambition.

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.

I owe my solitude to other people.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

I have an expression I use as I’ve gone around the world through my career: ‚You never tell another man or woman what’s in their interest. They know their interest better than you know their interest.‘

The fact that you are willing to say, ‚I do not understand, and it is fine,‘ is the greatest understanding you could exhibit.

There can be no doubt that the average man blames much more than he praises. His instinct is to blame. If he is satisfied he says nothing; if he is not, he most illogically kicks up a row.

Vanity is great motivation, to be fair.

Whoever does not have a good father should procure one.

In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.