“Patriotism is too deep a feeling to depict in the posing for a photograph.”

It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.

A tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure.

Love is life on a higher plain of existence, working through man to unite the forces of nature into a perfect whole.

You’ll never find a rainbow if you’re looking down.

Whomever lives, gambles with life.

There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.

My only enemy is time.

People miss happiness by chasing after false values and repressing the feelings that make life valuable and beautiful.

I am an artist, not a politician.

Laughter is very close to tears and vice versa.

Our tragedies are only as big as we make them.

My tramp is made up of mimicry.

Nothing is permanent in this wicked world, not even our troubles.

The desire for peace is universal.

Laughter is the tonic, the relief, the surcease from pain.

I’m unconscious while I’m acting. I live the role and am not myself.

I just think I have too much anxiety to listen to music. Sometimes it feels like noise, and sometimes it’s so affecting that I can’t recover from it.

Wearing a hijab never made me feel any more conservative – it made me feel safe. Then, after 9/11, I became the butt of a joke on the playground, so I stopped wearing it. Kids can be really cruel when you’re the only black girl in your Girl Scout troop.

I feel like when you say ‘activist,’ you have to have so much clarity, and I don’t always necessarily have so much clarity on how I want to help others, I just have this weird, deep urge to help other people. I’m trying to let God guide my body and use it as whatever kind of vehicle or vessel it needs to be.

I like my visuals to feel like movies.

I just sing what I’m feeling at the time and hope my fans will like that and appreciate that.

Kids will invest more, when they feel they’re being invested in.

But as I’ve said, failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result. And for me, it felt like that’s exactly what she was planting—a suggestion of failure long before I’d even tried to succeed.

We must act out passion before we can feel it.