While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

As long as you blame someone or something else – something outside you that’s bigger than you are – as the source of your problems, the problems won’t get solved.

You have to be able to accept failure to get better.

No one knows Anne’s better side, and that’s why most people can’t stand me. Oh, I can be an amusing clown for an afternoon, but after that, everyone’s had enough of me to last a month.

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.

You don’t read in your own field. You read in that field when you’re young, so that you can learn.

Homeland or death! Socialism or death! We shall overcome!

Shun no toil to make yourself remarkable by some talent or other; yet do not devote yourself to one branch exclusively. Strive to get clear notions about all. Give up no science entirely; for science is but one.

Anytime I feel lost, I pull out a map and stare. I stare until I have reminded myself that life is a giant adventure, so much to do, to see.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

We have the tendency to run away from suffering and to look for happiness. But, in fact, if you have not suffered, you have no chance to experience real happiness.

Personally I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

The first time you say something, it’s heard. The second time, it’s recognized, and the third time it’s learned.

Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance.

Football (soccer) is a matter of life and death, except more important.

I feel like people can relate to me because we all go through wins and roadblocks and passion and pain, and it’s a vibe.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.

Weak minds sink under prosperity as well as adversity; but strong and deep ones have two high tides.

It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.

I don’t want to be alone, I want to be left alone.

I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.

About astrology and palmistry: they are good because they make people vivid and full of possibilities. They are communism at its best. Everybody has a birthday and almost everybody has a palm.

As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.

A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day.

Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.

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

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.

Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve.

I think there are a number of things that you can do to encourage your kids‘ dreams, but I do believe in speaking by experience of having a lot of help along the way, stumbling in the past. We’ve all stumbled, and we certainly all deserve to get up and walk again.

I don’t think I’m tangible to myself.

You know, nothing is more important than education, because nowhere are our stakes higher; our future depends on the quality of education of our children today.

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

God made me and broke the mold.

Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?

You can’t have it all all at once. Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all, but in given periods in time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

Mental toughness is a lifestyle. It’s something that you live every single day of your life. When I was growing up, I was a lazy kid. I was a lazy kid, and everybody goes, ‚How did you get to where you’re at today? How did you get to where you’re running 200 miles at one time in 39 hours? Being so disciplined?‘

He not busy being born is busy dying.

We work to become, not to acquire.

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.

Spiritual people don’t float around all day on clouds of glory; they live in the real world and deal with real issues in real ways.

I’ve 20,000 hours of clinical practice; you’re not naive after the first few thousand. I’ve helped people deal with things that most people can’t imagine.

When you make the finding yourself – even if you’re the last person on Earth to see the light – you’ll never forget it.

I always had music growing up, but music was also like a journal. It was like my personal diary or personal journal. A lot of the things I couldn’t express to an individual, I would express them in my music.

You have to like the present; if not your life becomes secondhand, if you think it was better before. Or that it will be better in the future.

Find out who you are. And do it on purpose.

I mean… in life… what relationship is easy?

It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals. And so when I hear about negative and false attacks, I really don’t invest any energy in them, because I know who I am.

Narrow your life down to this moment. Your life situation may be full of problems – most life situations are – but find out if you have a problem at this moment. Do you have a problem now?

Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

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 look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.

Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.

Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.

I feel the emotion that life conjures up and the songs I write get me closer to my feelings and realising who I am. It’s a natural process.

Hollywood is not suited for me, and I am not suited for it.

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

The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.