Alicia Keys

When you’re first figuring yourself out, you care so much about what people think of you.

A great song can pull me out of a slump and lighten my heart.

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.

How incredible our ancestors were. The first astrophysicists, scientists, physicians, mathematicians, architects, creators of so much of the world as we know it. It’s a blessing to know what cloth you’re cut from!

You’ve got to have a good spirit on the inside. That’s what’s really going to make you look like you’re ready to rock the world.

Everything I do stems from something personal, not just because it will look good on paper or be a tax write-off.

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

If thou wouldn’t conquer thy weakness thou must not gratify it.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

We had the sky up there, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss whether they was made or just happened.

What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men’s minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

The painters could be identified by dirty fingernails; the writers by conversation in labored monosyllables and aggressive vulgarities which disguised their minds.

Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

Man – a creature made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again. The world is not yet exhausted; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before.

I’ve never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.

What a lot of things there are a man can do without.