“What’s in your soul is in your soul.”

My mother taught me that when you stand in the truth and someone tells a lie about you, don’t fight it.

I wish to you, joy and happiness. But above all this, I wish you love

Let the children’s laughter remind us how we used to be.

I was aware of people staring at me. No one moved. They seemed almost in trance. I just stared at the clock in the center of the church. When I finished, everyone clapped and started crying.

God gave me a voice to sing with, and when you have that, what other gimmick is there?

I finally faced the fact that it isn’t a crime not having friends. Being alone means you have fewer problems.

I think over the years, being a mother, I’ve matured in so many ways.

I’ve turned down a lot of arena dates because I’ve done the big-arena thing. Now, I want to do something where people can feel me and I can feel them.

I’m either my best friend or my worst enemy.

Never let your heart take precedence over reason, otherwise you will have problems.

Being around people like Aretha Franklin and Gladys Knight, Dionne Warwick and Roberta Flack, all these greats, I was taught to listen and observe.

If you say my eyes are beautiful, it’s because they are looking at you.

No one makes me do anything I don’t want to do.

She’s my teacher, my adviser, my greatest inspiration.

In grammar school some of the girls had problems with me. My face was too light. My hair was too long. It was the black-consciousness period, and I felt really bad.

I believe that children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside.

A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader’s soul.

If you want an enemy, the soul (nafs) is sufficient. If you want advice, death is sufficient.

I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.

Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

And she has a deep soul that others fear to dive in.

As a singer, you have to bring the soul to the song.

When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories.