I have a mother that's very strong and family that surround me and constantly tell me they love me.

Every human has four endowments- self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change.

Stephen Covey

Custom is petrification; nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century

Mark Twain

We must be prepared to make heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war. There is no task that is more important or closer to my heart.

Albert Einstein

Fan the sinking flame of hilarity with the wing of friendship; and pass the rosy wine.

Charles Dickens

Every action we take, everything we do, is either a victory or defeat in the struggle to become what we want to be.

Anne Byrhhe

One reason why the Enemy found this so east was that, without knowing it, I was already desperately anxious to get rid of my religion; and that for a reason worth recording. By a sheer mistake - and I still believe it to have been an honest mistake - in spiritual technique I had rendered my private practice of that religion a quiet intolerable burden. It came about in this way. Like everyone else I had been told as a child that one must not only say one's prayers but think abut what one was saying. Accordingly, when I came to a serious belief, I tried to put this into practice. At first it seemed plain sailing. But soon the false conscience (St. Paul's 'Law', Herbert's 'prattler') came into play. One had no sooner reached 'Amen' than it whispered, 'Yes. But are you sure you were really thinking about what you said?'; then, more subtly, 'Were you, for example, thinking about it as well as you did last night?' The answer, for reasons I did not then understand, was nearly always No. 'Very well,' said the voice, 'hadn't you, then, better try it over again?' And one obeyed; but of course with no assurance that the second attempt would be any better...I set myself a standard. No clause of my prayer was to be allowed to pass muster unless it was accompanied by what I called a 'realization,' by which I meant a certain vivedness of the imagination and the affections. My nightly task was to produce by sheer will power a phenomenon which will power could never produce, which was so ill-defined that I could never say with absolute confidence whether it had occurred, and which, even when it did occur, was of very mediocre spiritual value.

C.S. Lewis

Many of the artists who have represented Negro life have seen only the comic, ludicrous side of it, and have lacked sympathy with and appreciation for the warm big heart that dwells within such a rough exterior.

Henry Ossawa Tanner

The greatest humiliation in life, is to work hard on something from which you expect great appreciation, and then fail to get it.

E. W. Howe

While the mind is in doubt it is driven this way and that by a slight impulse.

Terence

Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The same people who smile in my face would be the same ones to talk behind my back.

Timbaland

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Martin Luther