Alicia Keys

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

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.

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

It’s my nature to downplay.

Once I became a mother I knew that I was strong, but not ready to do what I’m doing now

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

He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many fold in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale.

It is a happy talent to know how to play.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.

In failing circumstances no one can be relied on to keep their integrity.

One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.

Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the minority? By the minority, surely. ‘Tis pedantry to estimate nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by their importance to the mind of the time.

We know there is intention and purpose in the universe, because there is intention and purpose in us.

Knowledge is the treasure, but judgment is the treasurer of the one who is wise.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.