Reese Witherspoon

Confidence is everything in this business.

[on motherhood] I feel good, I’m proud of Election (1999) and very proud of this (her child). It couldn’t be a better time. It’s always the right time when it happens. You make it the right time.

I grew up in Tennessee. We didn’t know what Louis Vuitton was. I had to order all my prom outfits out of catalogs.

[On trying to get out of the part of June Carter Cash in Walk the Line] I called my attorney. My agent. My manager. I said “You know y’all, you’re serious about this? I’m really.. I gotta get out of this. Like can’t they call ‘Leann Rimes’? I mean she’s good.

I do think things were meant to happen. I’m just this little girl from Tennessee, and here I am today. I think a lot of things are just out of your hands.

[On asserting herself] They want people they can push around. I was the girl who was always asking, “Why? Yeah, I know you want me to do that – but why?” I always thought people wanted to hear my opinions. (Grins) But I gave them anyway. It’s just blind self-confidence. I get like a little terrier about things. My mother says I should have been an attorney.

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.

The Christian ethic played an essential part in my upbringing.

One who conquers himself is greater than another who conquers a thousand times a thousand on the battlefield.

Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.

There is no path to happiness: Happiness is the path.

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday.

I’m a bit superstitious about certain things, like what shoes to wear. If I wear the wrong shoes, the whole day may go wrong. Or if I don’t get to the bottom of the stairs before the door closes – stupid little things like that. Then I also have all the normal ones, like don’t walking under ladders and so on.

Do not learn how to react learn how to respond.

Those who are free of resentful thoughts surely find peace.

I think every person should have some faith inside him, in his heart. What matters is not an external display of this faith, but the inner state of the soul.

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.

Zen is not an art, it’s not a religion. It’s a realisation.

I come to realize that mind is no other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and stars.

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock and roll or Christianity.