Quotes

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.

I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has had to overcome while trying to succeed.

Success in life is founded upon attention to the small things rather than to the large things; to the every day things nearest to us rather than to the things that are remote and uncommon.

Dignify and glorify common labor. It is at the bottom of life that we must begin, not at the top.

There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life.

No greater injury can be done to any youth than to let him feel that because he belongs to this or that race he will be advanced in life regardless of his own merits or efforts.

Women can only raise men to a certain point in life. Certain things a man has to teach him or he will be taught by the streets. That's just how it is.

A lot of people were trying to take my life as far as, you know, in the court system. And I was childish, man. I made songs about public officials and things like that. Those people don't forget that and I don't trust people like that.

My violent music helps most kids avoid that street life because it scares them. My fans aren't blind to the consequences.

My music always been based off telling stories and now I really got a lot of stories to tell about my life, what my family went through, what my people went through.

I've got a lot to say about my life, about what I went through in prison and about what my family went through.

What I go through in my life, I tend to put it in my music. I always say the things that hurt me the most and that matter to me the most. I can't hold it in, man. It's like therapy.

Boyhood is the longest time in life for a boy. The last term of the school-year is made of decades, not of weeks, and living through them is like waiting for the millennium.

I always have thought that part of being involved with life is the same thing as just wanting to kick it with your friends, and being involved with life on a deeper level is wanting to change the situation that you're in.

My training was with some old British communists who had organized unions in the '60s and '70s. And their philosophy was, if you can't drink a pint with a man, how are you gonna get him to go on strike and risk his life?

Music is first for me. How the music makes me feel, it's like energy. It has to match my life. What's happening around me or to me. That's where it comes from.

I chose to do art in the way I always do it, which is with all the crazy contradictions of life in there.

What I like about music is that you make a song, you've got your ideas in it, and people make that song part of their life - they hang out with their friends to it, they get in arguments to it, they get married to it, they get divorced to it. It's in their world, and it takes on its own life.

There's the part of me that's the organizer, part of me that's the artist, part of me that's the person who, even with those two things, wants to figure out what my place in the world is. How to engage with it and whether my life has any meaning.

To me, you go through things like that and you learn from it. You add it on to your life, to try to make your life better. Instead of dogging people, learn something from it. And keep stepping.

My brother was very important to me. And he played guitar. So that's what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a guitar player. So he was the first one to inspire me to do something with my life. And I was so glad that he was there.

I believe that everything in life happens for a reason.

It was a confusing time in my life, a really bad day at the office.

When I was a child, I had posters of James Dean in my room. I was a big admirer of his work and was fascinated by him living on the edge. Looking back, my life was kind of the same.

When you are thrown onto the stage at 17 in such an enormous way, it becomes living on the edge because every step you take, every word you speak, every action you do becomes headline news. And it became, for me, life or death.