I always love to learn new things. That's the reason I like being an actor.

No matter where you're from, your dreams are valid.

What I've learned from myself is that I don't have to be anybody else. Myself is good enough.

You can't eat beauty, it doesn't sustain you. What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion, for yourself and those around you. That kind of beauty inflamed the heart and merchants the soul.

You fail, and then what? Life goes on. It's only when you risk failure that you discover things.

I realized that beauty was not a thing that I could acquire or consume, it was something that I just had to be.

What is fundamentally beautiful is compassion: for yourself and for those around you.

There is no shame in black beauty.

You have to allow for the impossible to be possible.

To be human is to seek perfection, and find joy in never attaining it.

I discovered that joy is not the negation of pain, but rather acknowledging the presence of pain and feeling happiness in spite of it.

Don’t be afraid of being yourself, but be afraid of being somebody else.

When I think of a merry, happy, free young girl - and look at the ailing, aching state a young wife generally is doomed to - which you can't deny is the penalty of marriage.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

Am I accurately reporting what I see in such a blossom? The answer is no ... and yes.

Nations will rise and fall, but equality remains the ideal. The univeral aim is to achieve respect for the entire human race, not for the dominant few.

I like to co-author books to learn from those I write with.

Learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever.

I guess the toughest things in translations are word play, which can never be reproduced exactly.

Painting is very interesting.

It is in the love of one's family only that heartfelt happiness is known.