“It’s horrible getting older. I mean, it’s wonderful because you see the circles of life get completed. But it’s horrible losing your looks.”

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

How could one create life with someone who represented death?

Home is where your books are.

Driving me away is easier than saying goodbye.

We were not human beings going through spiritual experiences; we were spiritual beings going through human experiences, in order to grow.

Betrayal betrays the betrayer.

In loving life you love what can’t survive.

What I would like to give my daughter is freedom. And this is something that must be given by example, not exhortation.

I see that the greatest thing about getting older is how your judgment changes and how you come to understand the cycles of life. And you keep having these amazing flashes of understanding.

Anger is really disappointed hope.

People are interested in their own sexuality and they’ve always reflected it in their art. End of story.

How wonderful to have someone to blame! How wonderful to live with one’s nemesis! You may be miserable, but you feel forever in the right.

The dilemma is that if one does not risk anything one risks even more.

To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary.

I am old enough to know that laughter, not anger, is the true revelation.

I believe that women should live for love, for motherhood and for intellect, and I believe we shouldn’t have to choose. And I believe that’s always been difficult for women, to express themselves intellectually, maternally, and passionately.

The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose

Stillmatic’ is the rebirth of ‘Illmatic,’ my first debut album to come out in 1994. ‘Stillmatic’ is me coming full circle in my career and with everything, and just bringing pure hip-hop back.

Humanism is the creed of those who believe that in the circle of enwrapping mystery, men’s fates are in their own hands.

There are also numberless earths circling around their suns.

The whole force of the respectable circles to which I belonged, that respectable circle which knew as I did not the value of security won, the slender chance of replacing it if lost or abandoned, was against me.

We all tend to be in the same circles – people like my Wu-Tang brothers, or Black Thought from The Roots.

Just give me a home, in a great circle dome Where stresses and strains are at ease.

To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.