Lauryn Hill

I wrote these words for everyone who struggles in their youth, who won’t accept deception instead of what is truth.

My emancipation don’t fit your equation.

Wake up, you’ve been sleeping. Take up your bed and walk. Stop blaming other people. Oh, it’s nobody else’s fault.

We don’t want people to have expectations of us, but then we have expectations of everybody else.

How you gonna win if you ain’t right within?

All of humanity is living in a dream world, but suffering real consequences.

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.

They are decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.

It seems to me that the god that is commonly worshipped in civilized countries is not at all divine, though he bears a divine name, but is the overwhelming authority and respectability of mankind combined. Men reverence one another, not yet God.

Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high.

A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.

Why should we be cowed by the name of Action?

There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man’s self.

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

I encourage you to live with life. Be courageous, adventurous. Give us a tomorrow, more than we deserve.

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.

Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set.

Having power is not nearly as important as what you choose to do with it.

Fidelity has enfranchised slaves, and adopted servants to be sons.

As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.

More knowledge may be gained of a man’s real character by a short conversation with one of his servants than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.