Alicia Keys

New artists can own their content and completely build their base and their following without having to sell or be owned by anybody and it creates such a diversity.

One thing a lot of people don’t know about me is that I’m a driver… I love driving.. I’m driven.

Everyone deserves an equal chance at success.

[on Prince] I learned about music that didn’t have any barriers or any kind of, like, containment. I learned about wild, crazy topics and ways to express yourself that had never been written in quite that way before. I learned that a human being could be able to defy all stereotypes, and be the epitome of badassness.

I’m open and ready to go to the next place, the next level, the next height.

We are a gorgeous, infinite circle of women all shades, all styles, in all the ways we were made. Inside of us everything blooms.

Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions, but those who kindly reprove thy faults.

Life is a festival only to the wise.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

What you don’t do can be a destructive force.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

In his private heart no man much respects himself.

That strong mother doesn’t tell her cub ‘Son, stay weak so the wolves can get you’. She says, ‘Toughen up, this is reality we are living in’.

Listening to both sides does not necessarily bring about a correct judgment.

There is little difference in people, but that little difference makes a big difference. That little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative.

It is a strange desire, to seek power and lose liberty, or to seek power over others and to lose power over a man’s self. The rising unto place is laborious, and by pains men come to greater pains, and it is sometimes base; and by indignities men come to dignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy thing.

The soul of God is poured into the world through the thoughts of men.

My evening visitors, if they cannot see the clock should find the time in my face.

The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven.

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit – not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviate from their graves.

She is but half a wife that is not, nor is capable of being, a friend.