Women don’t try to use me.

I’ve had moments when I’ve thought about somebody, picked up the phone to call them and they are on the line already, and I think that maybe there’s some vibration, some connection.

There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

I haven’t had that one great love, which is good. I don’t want that to be in the past – I want it to be in the future.

I don’t pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.

Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you – gently, with love, and hand your life back to you.

To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.

No one is a friend to his friend who does not love in return.

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

I spend a lot of time just, you know, with my girlfriend and my dog. And I mean, we don’t have a lot of furniture in our house, so it’s really simple. And we’re trying to build products for everyone in the world, right. And you don’t want to get isolated to do that.

When you’re traveling constantly, every day you become inspired, and it shows in my work, sonically, lyrically, visually. Conversations with women with different accents and stories told in those accents. I like to create characters based on different people I’ve met, and relationships. I like to tell stories loosely based on real-life events.

Men exist for the sake of one another.

I defy gravity.

I’m selfish, impatient, and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I’m out of control, and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.

He who loves 50 people has 50 woes; he who loves no one has no woes.

Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.

The upward course of a nation’s history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its average men and women.

It’s hard for anybody who’s been with me not to feel starved for affection when I’m making love to my ideas. Maybe it’s not meant for me to settle down and be married.

I don’t hate women – they just sometimes make me mad.

One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling.

It may be the part of a friend to rebuke a friend’s folly.

Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!

We are not angry with people we fear or respect, as long as we fear or respect them; you cannot be afraid of a person and also at the same time angry with him.

If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.

Fashion is always of the time in which you live. It is not something standing alone. But the grand problem, the most important problem, is to rejeuvenate women. To make women look young. Then their outlook changes. They feel more joyous.

What did I owe the rest of the world? Nothing.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

I am so tired of fear. And I don’t want my girls to live in a country, in a world, based on fear.

I have only one counsel for you – be master.

Ranking among the greatest Christmas movie classics, ‚It’s a Wonderful Life‘ tells a beautiful story about the priceless value of relationships.

In one day, I have times where I’m feeling great, I feel like I love my life, and then 2:30 rolls around and I’m the angriest man alive. My wife sees it.

I’m attracted to women who are smart and funny and ambitious and have lives of their own and great families. Isn’t that what attracts anyone?

When people are around us, they should leave better off than they were previously. Rather than feeling discouraged or defeated, people should feel challenged and inspired after spending any time with you and me.

What good am I? I can’t have kids. I can’t cook. I’ve been divorced three times. Who would want me?

My mom and I have always been there for each other. We had some tough times, but she was always there for me.

When you are organizing a group of people, the first thing that we do is we talk about the history of what other people have been able to accomplish – people that look like them, workers like them, ordinary people, working people – and we give them the list: these are people like yourself; this is what they were able to do in their community.

For how many things, which for our own sake we should never do, do we perform for the sake of our friends.

Remember that no relationship is a total waste of time. You can always learn something about yourself.

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.

The spirit is there in every boy; it has to be discovered and brought to light.

I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves, and I watch my daughters – two beautiful, intelligent black young women – playing with their dogs on the White House lawn. And because of Hillary Clinton, my daughters, and all our sons and daughters, now take for granted that a woman can be president of the United States.

When you get to a place where you understand that love and belonging, your worthiness, is a birthright and not something you have to earn, anything is possible.

Never injure a friend, even in jest.

I find with most of my readers are kind of like me, sort of people who were a little bit naive in life and then learned the hard way that this is what’s going on, the political games and most of my readers write to me telling me that the book helped them open their eyes to what other people are doing to them.

We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

This is my Bible. I am what it says I am. I have what it says I have. I can do what it says I can do.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

Love is trembling happiness.

I think life is a matter of choices and that wherever we are, good or bad, is because of choices we make.

Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.

Feminism… I think the simplest explanation, and one that captures the idea, is a song that Marlo Thomas sang, ‚Free to be You and Me.‘

There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.

My dear sisters, whatever your calling, whatever your circumstances, we need your impressions, your insights, and your inspiration. We need you to speak up and speak out in ward and stake councils.

I’m more of an adventurous type than a relationship type.

I think I have had so much blessing – I’ve had my brother, who was brilliant – I think my family came closest to making a genius when they made my brother – Bailey was just all of that. He loved me.

People hate as they love, unreasonably.

When I’m in management meetings when we’re deciding my future, those decisions are left up to me. I’m the one who has to go out and fulfill all these obligations, so I should be able to choose which ones I do or not. That’s the part of my life where I feel most in control.