Alicia Keys

I’m taking more time to listen to myself. It’s allowed me to be an aggressive bad ass, calling it as I see it

I don’t want to cover up anymore. Not my face, not my mind, not my soul, not my thoughts, not my dreams, not my struggles, not my emotional growth. Nothing.

The amount of people in this world who are here to do something great far outweighs the rest.

I feel the presence of a higher power. I believe that what you give is what you get. It’s universal law. I believe in the power of prayer and of words. I’ve learned that when you predict that negative things will happen, they do.

Musicians have a really big part to play in spreading messages because they’re able to reach a large portion of people on an emotional level. Artists reach people at their heart; it’s the only time we meet in one place and put our differences aside. When you’re in a forum listening to music, all you feel in that moment is love and the understanding.

I first fell in love with the piano, I knew it was me. I was dying to play.

If you’re bringing up kids, you just want to smother them with love and praise and enthusiasm. So I don’t think you can mollycoddle your kids too much really.

I have so much more to go through as a young lady. But oh my God. I feel like I can do anything.

We all acquire damage as infants and children and we work on removing those scars all of our lives. You won’t heal everything, but what’s important is the work.

As a kid, I was making a building with blocks in our playroom. I didn’t have enough. So I asked my younger brother Robert if I could borrow some of his. He said, ‘Okay, but you have to give them back when you’re done.’ I used all of my blocks, then all of his blocks, and when I was done I had a great building, which I then glued together. Robert never did get those blocks back.

You can’t cheat kids. If you cheat them when they’re children they’ll make you pay when they’re sixteen or seventeen by revolting against you or hating you or all those so-called teenage problems. I think that’s finally when they’re old enough to stand up to you and say, ‘What a hypocrite you’ve been all this time. You’ve never given me what I really wanted, which is you’.

All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

Kids instinctively know – although they will argue to the contrary – that they really are not mature enough to make good decisions on some important issues.

Once you’re grown up you can’t come back.

When you give directives to a child, especially a teenager, you must consider the nature of your child.

You don’t want to be with a boy who is too stupid to appreciate a smart young lady. There is no boy who is cute enough or interesting enough to stop you from getting your education.

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

I think every kid needs to get a taste of what it’s like to do that real hard work.

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

I was brought up in a very ordinary family, in fact, a worker’s family. Both my father and mother were ordinary citizens.