You aren’t normal if you sing to people. You aren’t a normal person. It’s nerve-racking.

We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences, and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves: nothing original, pristine, clear.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

You stand out in the crowd only because you have these many, many carrying you on their shoulders.

Black men don’t like to be called ‚boys,‘ but women accept being called ‚girls.‘

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

You learn that there’s no right way to do it, no wrong way to do it. It’s just what you feel comfortable with, to trust that, and don’t let anybody box you in to a certain style of parenting or make you feel a certain way about what your kids do.

I think people should feel encouraged to be themselves.

Genteel women suppose that those things do not really exist about which it is impossible to talk in polite company.

The bottom line is that everyone thinks differently.

When I say to you, there is nobody like me, and there never was, that is a statement I want every woman to feel and make about themselves.

I don’t have much patience for people who are self-conscious about the act of eating, and it irritates me when someone denies themselves the pleasure of a bloody hunk of steak or a pungent French cheese because of some outdated nonsense about what’s appropriate or attractive.

A chorus is not easy.

I have always marched to my own beat, and most frequently, it was inconsistent not only with my own immediate family, but with my culture as well.

I say what I want to say and do what I want to do. There’s no in between. People will either love you for it or hate you for it.

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

Creation is a sustained period of bliss, even though the subject can still be very sad. Because there’s the triumph of coming through and understanding that you have, and that you did it the way only you could do it. You didn’t do it the way somebody told you to do it.

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

All of us are in the same place, each with our own rooms, and we were allowed to do whatever we wanted. Which is totally different than college, where they manage your schedule for you. In the NBA, you’re on your own.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

SEALs are human beings. We may all have the same haircuts, but we aren’t robots. Some SEALs are great people. Some are not great people. Some have done unspeakably terrible things. You’re dealing with different people, different dreams, different desires.

I’m different than most people. When I cross the finish line of a big race, I see that people are ecstatic, but I’m thinking about what I’m going to do tomorrow. It’s as if my journey is everlasting, and there is no finish line.

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

The more you like yourself, the less you are like anyone else, which makes you unique.

All I can do is be me, whoever that is.

Freedom is relative.

I am who I am and I say what I think. I’m not putting a face on for the record.

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

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.

I’ve been singing Shakira songs in front of my bathroom mirror into my hairbrush forever. It’s like a daily routine.

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.

I look out at the stadiums full of people and see them all knowing the words to songs I wrote. And curling their hair! I remember straightening my hair because I wanted to be like everybody else, and now the fact that anybody would emulate what I do? It’s just funny. And wonderful.

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

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

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

I grew up in a musical family; the majority of my growing up was done in Hawaii. It’s what we do. You sing, you dance, you play ukulele and you drink.

I don’t know, I feel desperate when I sing. And I look desperate – it feels like I’m singing for my life, which makes me twitch, if that makes sense.

Some artists just ruin their voices because they don’t know any better.

Understand: as children and young adults, we are taught to conform to certain codes of behavior and ways of doing things. We learn that being different comes with a social price.

It’s a representation of yourself, and you can express a lot of your creativity with what your wearing.

I didn’t try to copy my dad or fit into the pressure or the mold that everybody tried to make me fit into.

The worst thing I can be is the same as everybody else. I hate that.

I can simply tell you that since I was a kid, I didn’t like to look like anyone else.

I used to sing songs and write with my uncle, Bill Owens.

Even as a child, Muhammad Ali got perverse pleasure out of being different. He liked the attention it got him, but most of all he just liked being himself: odd and independent.

I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven’t belonged to any company or any system. It isn’t easy to live like this in Japan.

We human beings are strange creatures and still reserve the right to think for ourselves.

I don’t really have a gimmick or a ‚thing.‘ I’m one of the few artists who gets to be himself every day.

Originality is a thing we constantly clamour for, and constantly quarrel with.

My style has always been my own, just like my flow and style.

It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.

We are all special cases.

Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting ‚O.K.‘ has deposed the more affirmative ‚Yes,‘ so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of ‚like‘ are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.

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?

When you’re singing you can hear the echo of people in the audience singing every single word with you, and that was that big dream that I had for myself. It’s happening.

I believe that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, increased intelligence, new friends, super self-confidence, heightened sexual attractiveness, and a better sense of humor.

I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.

It’s nice to be included in people’s fantasies but you also like to be accepted for your own sake.