Alicia Keys

They say that every child learns from their mother – it’s ingrained from babyhood.

It’s my nature to downplay.

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.

In the 1990s, with Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, those really big female artists were very glamorous, it was all about the glamour at that time. And so there was a big switch, the desire to be more who you were, not so beholden to this whole standard of beauty. It was a liberation. You see Mary J Blige – she did the same, wearing the combat boots.

Until we’re in those rooms as equally as men are, it can’t shift.

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

Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present.

No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no past at my back.

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will or against his will he draws his portrait to the eye of his companions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters it. It is a threadball thrown at a mark, but the other end remains on the thrower.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.

Suppose the world were only one of God’s jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?

A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.

Society is a hospital of incurables.

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns.

Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

Shame arises from the fear of men, conscience from the fear of God.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

It is all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.