I say, ‚Yeah, Taylor Swift.‘ I think she is a smart, beautiful girl. I think she’s making all the right moves. She’s got a good head on her shoulders. She’s surrounded with wonderful people. Her songs are great. She keeps herself anchored. She knows who she is, and she’s living and standing by that.

It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.

How do you know what it’s like to be stupid if you’ve never been smart?

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.

I’m a can-do girl.

If you’re serious, you really understand that it’s important that you laugh as much as possible and admit that you’re the funniest person you ever met. You have to laugh. Admit that you’re funny. Otherwise, you die in solemnity.

One often makes music to supplement one’s world.

Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.

The answer to the problem of inequality is for the people who are fortunate enough to either have been gifted or deserved more to do everything they can to make the communities around them as strong as they possibly can.

I sing seriously to my mom on the phone. To put her to sleep, I have to sing ‚Maria‘ from West Side Story. When I hear her snoring, I hang up.

You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.

There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life.

No sanction can stand against ignited minds.

We can never make ourselves better by trying… praying more or longer, studying more of the Word, performing good works, etc. Don’t get me wrong… it’s not bad to do any of these things. In fact, it’s good. It’s just that doing them in God’s power is the only way those things will have any real and lasting effect in our lives.

Every summer’s mine.

I remain just one thing, and one thing only, and that is a clown. It places me on a far higher plane than any politician.

People should make up their own mind about what they think of me.

The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent dead wood.

People don’t realize that we, we meaning people in show business, have the same problems as everyone else. Money doesn’t change that. Fame doesn’t change that. Sometimes that brings on more problems. You know, it’s just a different kind of problems.

The single most powerful thing I can be is to be myself.

The fame isn’t important to me. It’s a blessing to have. Having so many people that support me, that love me and listen to my music, is beautiful.

Certainly I’m not going to sit on the Internet all day and read what Sam from Iowa is saying about me. But I’m a sponge. I’ve always been a sponge.

I don’t have any oratory skills. But I would not use them if I had.

I went to a lovely school, and I got an incredible education. And I actually think that my education is what really sets me apart, ‚cause I’m very smart.

Women must pay for everything. They do get more glory than men for comparable feats, but, they also get more notoriety when they crash.

I wanted to prove the sustaining power of music.

I’ve never had that much trouble with the paparazzi, but I don’t run the same circles that a lot of these people that do get hounded by the paparazzi.

People are already finding ways to make their music and play it in front of people and have a life in music, I guess, and I think that’s pretty much all you can ask.

I found music to be the therapy of choice. I guess it is for a lot of people.

The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.

It is important to remember yourself.

Go to you bosom: Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.

If you are against yourself, you will never reach your highest potential. And when you criticize yourself, you’re criticizing God.

I can’t tell anybody else how to run their life or their business, but I really believe I’ve got a good bead on myself.

Women, like men, should try to do the impossible. And when they fail, their failure should be a challenge to others.

In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.

A letdown is worth a few songs. A heartbreak is worth a few albums.

A whole people with the ballot in their hands possess the most conclusive and unlimited power ever entrusted to humanity.

I would say that jazz is my own language.

The beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure that she carries or the way she combs her hair.

I want to be a recording artist for my whole entire life. But Broadway is something I would come back to at any given moment. I love, love, love doing theater.

I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president’s wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.

The deepest desire of the human spirit is to be acknowledged.

Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

Memories are thoughts that arise. They’re not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it’s just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.

I think that, whatever happens, I’m just happy I’ve written those songs and I’ve made an album. That’s really big for me, and I’m proud of that.

I don’t really believe in the type of pressure that people are wanting to put on the type of music that I make.

I do put a lot of God in my music, but not because I’m super religious. There are a lot of demons in my music, too. I acknowledge both.

A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music – these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.

I think a lot of people love to convolute what everyone else does in order to disempower women.

I’m a painter in sound.

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’re looking at a middle-class guy. I am who I am.

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one’s death, one dies one’s life.

I get naturally uncomfortable when I’m put under a magnifying glass.

Sometimes I catch myself stooping, and whenever I am like that, I am sure something is not quite right.

I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.

The power of intuitive understanding will protect you from harm until the end of your days.

The real power of the Buddha was that he had so much love. He saw people trapped in their notions of small separate self, feeling guilty or proud of that self, and he offered revolutionary teachings that resounded like a lion’s roar, like a great rising tide, helping people to wake up and break free from the prison of ignorance.

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

The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years.