We acquire the strength we have overcome.

The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

A man is a god in ruins.

Blame is safer than praise.

I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.

The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself.

Imitation is suicide.

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.

Hitch your wagon to a star.

Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.

Original thinking migrates each day in search of nourishment.

Some of us are timid. We think we have something to lose so we don't try for that next hill.

If you're for the right thing, you do it without thinking.

It is better to control oneself, if one can, and not hit back. But on certain occasions, it is imperative to defend oneself. I don't think it's fair to ask anybody not to defend herself or himself.

I think a number of the leaders are, whether you like it or not, in the hip-hop generation. And when they understand enough, they'll do wonders. I count on them.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money.' Yes, I think everybody should be paid handsomely; I insist on it, and I pay people who work for me, or with me, handsomely.

I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.

Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity.

He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things.

The uses of travel are occasional, and short; but the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversation; and this is a main function of life.

A foreign country is a point of comparison, where from to judge his own.

We don’t grow old. When we cease to grow, we become old.

I will say, get health. No labor, pains, temperance, poverty, nor exercise, that can gain it, must be grudged.