You don’t need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!

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

My ‚fear‘ is my substance, and probably the best part of me.

You have enough people against you… be for yourself.

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.

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

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

I really have no interest in myself.

One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.

If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

Every summer’s mine.

I don’t worry about stress. I create it.

I’m confident in who I am. I’ve come to a place in my life where I’ve accepted things that are me, as opposed to feeling pressure to explain myself to people around me. That’s just the way I’ve always tried to be. It didn’t change when I became a star.

I don’t want to be fake. I’m just being me. And I have the power to break stereotypes and whatever useless rules that society puts on us.

The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

All ways of living can be sanctified, and for each individual, the ideal way is that to which our Lord leads him through the natural development of his tastes and the pressure of circumstances.

We are all of us stars, and we deserve to twinkle.

I have practically no private life. I’m already used to this and ready for it. Yes, sometimes it is hard, but it is the choice I made.

No one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl. All little girls should be told they’re pretty, even if they aren’t.

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.

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.

Magic is believing in yourself, if you can do that, you can make anything happen.

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.

It seems to me that terrestrial beings, as they become more autonomous, psychologically richer, shut themselves up in a way against one another, and at the same time gradually become strangers to the cosmic environment and currents, impenetrable to one another, and incapable of exteriorizing themselves.

I’ve used my femininity and my sexuality as a weapon and a tool… but that’s just natural.

I’m not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We’re not ‚celebrities‘, whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They’re what people meet.

It’s empowering to know I am doing something, I am taking a stand, I am disrupting.

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

Our goal in the ’70s was to end the closed door era. There were so many things that were off limits to women: policing, firefighting, mining, piloting planes.

Blacks, especially in America, have been raised with a slave mentality – they don’t feel that they have the right to speak as loud as possible.

I admire people who destroy themselves.

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

There’s a part of you – the born-again part, your spirit – that’s dead to sin. That’s why it bothers you now when you sin. The ‚wilderness‘ part of you – your soul – is your unrenewed mind, out-of-control emotions, and stubborn will.

A man who is not afraid is not aggressive, a man who has no sense of fear of any kind is really a free, a peaceful man.

You are the universe, you aren’t in the universe.

The difficult thing is that vulnerability is the first thing I look for in you and the last thing I’m willing to show you. In you, it’s courage and daring. In me, it’s weakness.

You always want your people to be proud of what you have accomplished.

A lot of people like to do certain things, but they’re not that good at it. Keep going through the things that you like to do, until you find something that you actually seem to be extremely good at. It can be anything.

As an athlete, you’d better laugh at yourself when you slip in the mud.

Woman was God’s second mistake.

America is the student who defies the odds to become the first in a family to go to college – the citizen who defies the cynics and goes out there and votes – the young person who comes out of the shadows to demand the right to dream. That’s what America is about.

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

I never sell a book. I sell myself. And the way to sell yourself is to be an instrument of love.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

I’m trying to show everybody that I’m a girl, and I’m five foot four, and you can do anything you want, no matter your gender. It’s your world, too!

Few men would dare to read their own autobiography if all their deeds were recorded in it; few can look back upon their entire career without a blush.

Everybody has a purpose.

Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

What you are comes to you.

Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. So instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then, and only then, hope will come.

I’m not this horrible, evil person.

I’ve had a few semi-toxic relationships, but it’s not what I look for when I’m seeing someone.

I’m not a centerfold.

Adversity has ever been considered the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself.

If you’re embarrassed because you have some notion about how men are supposed to behave, and it doesn’t include weeping, then you have some personal work to do.

He who falls in love with himself will have no rivals.

I periodically realize every few years that the only person whose taste I really trust is me.