The dullness of certain people is sometimes a sufficient security against the attack of an artful man.

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.

All women are flirts, but some are restrained by shyness, and others by sense.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.

Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.

Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.

Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.

There are no accidents so unlucky from which clever people are not able to reap some advantage, and none so lucky that the foolish are not able to turn them to their own disadvantage.

You must always see your loneliness as an opportunity to meet something good unexpected, something new unknown before, something interesting not happened yet!

Humor's a weapon if you want to make it one.

After what others would call a fun day out together, we feel as if we have been at the Red Cross, donating blood.

A catless writer is almost inconceivable.

Autumn finally arrived. And when it did, I came to a decision. Something had to give: I couldn't keep on living like this.

To be is to be related.

I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience... How would they know?

All human beings are entrepreneurs.

Writing in English was a major challenge. I didn't want other songwriters to write for me. I wanted to preserve the spirit of my songs in Spanish. I am the same Shakira in English as I am in Spanish.

But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.