Lauryn Hill

Don’t be a hard rock when you really are a gem!

The only way to know is to live, learn, and grow.

I wrote these words for everyone who struggles in their youth, who won’t accept deception instead of what is truth.

If everyone is a product of this society, who will say the things that need to be said, and do the things that need to be done, without compromise?

How you gonna win if you ain’t right within?

And deep in my heart. The answer, it was in me. And I made up my mind. To define my own destiny.

The only guide to man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honor.

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

You cannot dream yourself into a character you must hammer and forge yourself into one.

His heart was as great as the world, but there was no room in it to hold the memory of a wrong.

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

I never worry about action, but only inaction.

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

Everyone should keep a mental wastepaper basket, and the older he grows, the more things will he promptly consign to it.

Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.

Whatever limits us we call fate.

Out of the unconscious lips of babes and sucklings are we satirized.

The more experiments you make the better.

It is the privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer with a certain haughtiness. He can well afford not to conciliate, whose faithful work will answer for him.