“An older guy, he’s going to show you things that a young man can’t show you. He’s going to show you how to stay alive. He’s going to show you how to turn corners where your young friends will show you how to turn right into that wall, you know what I’m saying?”

Life is about growing and evolving. I feel like my life has been in stages, and the stages I went through when I was younger allowed me to grow into the man I am today.

Reggae is music of love. It has joy and pain, but it feels good.

Well, hip-hop is what makes the world go around.

It’s Christmas time and my rhyme’s steady bumpin. Everybody happy, hair still nappy, Gonna steal a gift for my old grandpappy.

If the ride is more fly, then you must buy.

The most important decision I’ve made in business? The choices of people I have around me. When I first started I brought everybody with me, my homies from the neighborhood, criminals. I just said, ‘Come on everybody, we made it.’ Then I had to realize we didn’t make it. I made it.

The best advice I’ve ever got is to be yourself. Stay true to who you are and what you stand for and you’ll go far in life.

I have always said I was Bob Marley reincarnated.

Your only gain is to try to get me to fall down to your level. Man, you worser than devils.

It’s so easy for a kid to join a gang, to do drugs. We should make it that easy to be involved in football and academics.

Be your own leader, be your own self, step out of my shadows and be your own person.

What I try to push and promote is peace through the whole music industry.

Know when to lie to your kids.

I just change with the times. I really don’t have a say in what’s going on. Music was here before me.

When I’m not longer rapping, I want to open up an ice cream parlor and call myself Scoop Dogg.

Do what your heart tells you is right.

If I never wake again, I certainly will have lived while I was alive.

If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image.

Aliveness doesn’t happen in silence. Aliveness doesn’t happen in repression. Aliveness happens in action.

We have to reconceptualize and understand that the act of pursuing our dreams and being our full selves is what allows us to feel alive.

Charity is the soul of faith, makes it alive; without love, faith dies.

Whatever you are doing, that which makes you feel the most alive…that is where God is.

No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a strange, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.