Lauryn Hill

We can’t plan life. All we can do is be available for it.

My emancipation don’t fit your equation.

Wisdom is better than silver and gold. I was hopeless, now I’m on hope road.

Be honest, brutally honest. That is what’s going to maintain relationships.

The only wealth I have to give is not material and if you need much more than that, I’m not available.

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

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

Live, let live, and help live

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

Use every distraction as an object of meditation and they cease to be distractions.

No matter how much or how little I knew technically, I was able to get the best out of people I worked with.

For most men, and most circumstances, pleasure –tangible material prosperity in this world -is the safest test of virtue. Progress has ever been through the pleasures rather than through the extreme sharp virtues, and the most virtuous have leaned to excess rather than to asceticism.

For disappointments, that come not by our own folly, they are the trials or corrections of Heaven: and it is our own fault, if they prove not our advantage.

There is always room for a person of force and they make room for many.

The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.

Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness, — whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs. I doubt not this was the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly wise, as being actually, not apparently so.

A banker is a fellow who lends his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.