Alicia Keys

It’s my nature to downplay.

In the 80s, when I was a little girl, this whole Midtown area was a different world. These are the streets that I walked, and learned my lessons on, and heard the music, and witnessed disenfranchised people, and people who just had dreams and hopes. Every pimp, every prostitute, every drug dealer, every Broadway dreamer wishing they could be a writer, or a musician, or an actor.

We think – or maybe we’re shown – that the only way to express ourselves is through that very sexy energy. I think there’s more than that which shows our power. For me, I sometimes feel the most sexy when I’m totally covered head to toe.

Only a woman can breathe under the water of life defying gravity and staying zen while doing it.

Have you watched Snow White lately? I get real funky about the classics; I don’t like (my sons) watching it. It’s totally sexist, misogynistic – she’s cleaning for seven dwarfs. There’s nothing wrong with a woman who chooses to stay at home with her family, it’s a hard-ass job, but it’s the way it’s spoken about.

I was subscribing to this sick identity. … Stay in your place, be feminine, be a lady, don’t make too much noise.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

It is a profitable Wisdom to know when we have done enough: Much time and Pains are spared, in not flattering our selves against Probabilities.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

Language is the archives of history.

A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.

I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.

There was the cell where Fr. Eulalio, a thriving lunatic of eighty-six who was castigating himself for unchristian pride at having all the vowels in his name, and greatly revered for his continuous weeping, went blind in an ecstasy of such howling proportions that his canonization was assured.

Sir, a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat, will not find his way thither the sooner in a gray one.

The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne.

A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.

Each thought that is welcomed and recorded is a nest egg by the side of which more will be laid.

How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms.

One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.

Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.