Lauryn Hill Quotes

There are a lot of young black girls who I meet in my travels who don't have a lot of self-esteem. So if I communicate to them that they're beautiful, no white person should find fault in that. It doesn't mean that young white girls aren't beautiful, because they are just as beautiful.

You say, Wait a minute, God, you spared me from a slave job in an office, and now I have a slave job onstage. I am not on that clock no more.

Our podium is the music. It's really important that we stay focused, because things become misconstrued in the media.

I don't buy into that whole concept of success that I have this mountain with this moat around it and then I get into my big car and drive to my destination and never see people. That's not my concept of success.

I was unhappy with my life. I had acquired everything I thought I wanted, only to find out, This is it?

I can do what you do, easy, BELIEVE ME
Frontin' niggas give me hee-bee-gee-bees

I have a problem with procrastination. I have a great deal of difficulty deciding what to wear. It's a woman thing.

Tell me who I've got to be, to get some reciprocity

I had an economic system imposed on me.

I keep letting you back in. How can I explain myself? As painful as this thing has been, I just can't be with no one else.

I don't listen to a lot of music at all. I think that's very bizarre too, because it was such a comfort zone for me. But I don't know if I had my fill, but I don't listen to a lot of music, because I'm creating it.

Love is an incredible thing but we don't know love like we should. Unconditional love we don't know it because if a person stops stimulating us, we stop loving them.

We should always be aspiring to know more, and to better ourselves, and to improve ourselves. To improve ourselves, because that's how we improve the world around us, by working within us.

My whole life at a certain point was studio, hotel, stage, hotel, stage, studio, stage, hotel, studio, stage. I was expressing everything from my past, everything that I had experienced prior to that studio stage time, and it was like you have to go back to the well, in order to give someone something to drink. I felt like a cistern, dried up and like there was nothing more. And it was so beautiful.

I love being able to reach people directly, but in an ideal scenario, I would not have to rush the release of new music ... but the message is still there,

I am just beginning to be more comfortable with my identity.

As artists, we have an opportunity to help the public evolve, raise consciousness and awareness, teach, heal, enlighten and inspire in ways the democratic process may not be able to touch. So we keep it moving.

I think everything happens in time. There's a time for everything. There's a time to be in a group, and there's a time to be solo.

I have hour spurts when I feel fine and I can walk normal and stuff, other hours, I'm wobbling. I feel like there's somebody behind me kicking my legs out from underneath me. The whole tumor symptom thing is crazy. It's unpredictable. It really messes with your life.

Real religion is no religion at all.

My mother has all my awards, because if I walked downstairs every day and saw all my achievements it would be so easy to become complacent.

Now you are meeting another Lauryn, so it's good to be reintroduced.

God surrounded me with the right team, with the team that I needed to help me exercise all of my ideas. You need that. You need that army, you need that force.

I'm trying to be a loving and caring mother, a loving and caring wife-to-be, a loving and caring daughter, a loving and caring friend, a responsible person. And every day is another opportunity for me to be successful at that.

I've leaned on God for so long. "Hey, God, you just gave me this gift, and I'm just going to go out there and sing." But I'm realizing how much larger and how expansive my gift becomes when I actually pay attention to it and try to practice and try to perfect it.

Hypocrites always wanna play innocent

Sometimes we all need to take time and give thanks.

Let me be patient, let me be kind, make me unselfish, without being blind, though I may suffer, I'll envy it not and endure what comes cause he is all that I got

I try not to have a day pass where I don't read something from the Bible. It's like my sustenance to me.

Now the skies could fall
Not even if my boss should call
The world it seems so very small
'Cause nothing even matters at all

My concept of successful living is escaping the matrix, as we've talked about. It has very little to do with what people think success is. I actually feel successful right now, even though I don't have an album out, or a video or a song on the radio, because I'm trying to be obedient to His will.

Everyday is another chance to get things right.

I do support artists standing by their beliefs and walking with integrity. We have to find a better way to commercially exploit music while giving artists their proper respect. This cannot be done while taking their contributions for granted or trying to control the scope of their growth and power through threats and fear tactics.

For a while, the genre seemed to be just about sex and crime. Rappers are storytellers; the stories don't need to be true!

Loving you is like a Song I replay every 3 Minutes and 30 Seconds of every Day ...

I was very active. I was always all over the place trying to do a million things, just into this activity. If you asked me when I was 14 what I wanted to be: "Activist, first, is my occupation. I am an activist."

I like a brother that cuts to the chase.

I think the work ethic that was established in my family was something very important. If you plant the seed, if you sow sparingly and reap sparingly. If you sow in abundance you'll reap in abundance.

Everything takes place in a season. There was a season when that's all I did was listen to the music. Now I'm just in a place where I don't listen, I create. And if I do listen there are specific things that I listen to, and for specific reasons.

My mother gave me a piece of bread, which was love and encouragement. The correction was the meat, the substance. And then she would sandwich that with another piece of bread, which was love and encouragement. That was very important in shaping and molding our morality, our understanding of ourselves, making sure that we didn't think we were better than or less than anyone, feeling no more worthy or no less worthy than anyone else.

And what you need ironically. Will turn out what you want to be. If you just let it.

We think the man with the best rap will protect and save us, but it's not usually that way. Love is something deeper and purer.

It's funny - more people talk about my 'babe-dom' now than they did before I had a child. Whatever. I guess I'm a role model in hot pants now. That's cool!

The only help I need to live, is unprofessional. The only wealth I have to give, is not material. And if you need much more than that, I'm not available.

God said, All right, I'm gonna show you. I made you what you are. God takes care of me. I'm just the one who delivers the message.

A lot of us are too busy focusing on what we think people want to hear, as opposed to just saying what's in our hearts.

We've got to protect the music and make sure it never gets exploited.

I started to see that my concept of spirituality was totally wrong.

Being young and female in America, you watch a lot of T.V., and you grow up on false images of what love truly is. We think the man with the best rap will protect and save us, about it's not usually that way. Then you learn love is something deeper and purer in form.

I'm making music for other people to listen to for pleasure. And hopefully, later on maybe they'll listen to it and go, "That bass line, boy, did you hear the way those drums interacted with that?"

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

To me that's a reflection of love, when someone can see you enjoying yourself, and want to participate, or want to encourage, or want to help you to do something that you enjoy.

We don't know love like we should. We always talk about 'I have unconditional loveunconditional love iswe don't even know it. Because if a person stops stimulating us, we stop loving them. You're not interesting to talk to anymore, goodbye. But that real love, that love that sometimes is difficult, difficult to have. That's that love. And that's a confidence builder.

I didn't have that intense ambition to be a musician or an actress. I just enjoyed it. And by enjoying it, because I loved it, it enabled me to get better at what I was doing, because there was a love behind it.

I'm in a very close-knit, very, very tight family. My grandmother had 13 kids, so we had a lot of family like 50, 60 grandchildren and we all lived in Jersey, relatively in the same area. So every time there was something, my entire family was there. And I just believed everybody's family was like that.

I wrote these words for everyone who struggles in their youth.
Who won't accept deception instead of what is truth.
It seems we lose the game, before we even start to play.
Who made these rules? We're so confused. Easily led astray.

With The Fugees initially, and even with 'Miseducation', it was very hip-hop - always a singing over beats. I don't think people have really heard me sing out. So if I do record again, perhaps it will have an expanded context. Where people can hear a bit more.

Just because I have a guitar, it doesn't mean that changes me. I still rhyme, I still sing.

Tomorrow is always another day to make things right.

I don't need anybody to market or promote me. If people don't want to hear this music, then it's not for them. You cannot please everybody.

I don't want to be religious, I want to be spiritual. Anybody can be religious. Some people jog religiously. You don't want to be that, you want to be spiritual. You want to have a relationship with God as opposed to doing what everyone else does.

No matter how I think we grow, you always seem to let me know it ain't working, and when I try to walk away you hurt yourself to make me stay, this is crazy

Everyone is in the same situation, at different levels and in different places.

To those supporters who were told that I abandoned them, that is untrue. I abandoned greed, corruption, and compromise, never you, and never the artistic gifts and abilities that sustained me.

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? Truth will never start out popular in a world more concerned with marketability than righteousness. It will initially suffer ridicule and even violence- yet ultimately it is undeniable. All of humanity is living in a dream world, but suffering real consequences.

I never did anything I'm really ashamed of.

I think what people are attracted to about me, if anything, is my passion. People got exposed to my passion through music and song first.

Whenever we submit our will to someone else's opinion, a part of us dies

Think black love, think universal love. Just think love.

As long as I remember that the glory is His and not my own. When I confuse that, I get in trouble. We think that we glorify ourselves, and the object is to glorify God first, and in doing that you become glorified, you get glorified.

From the time that you are a child, you grow up repressing yourself.

I believe God will make a way.

I ran very fast in the wrong direction.

Every time truth comes we hate it, because it's coming against our ego. Are you going to let the ego come between you and this person you love?

With the things that I love, I tried to put a couple seeds, a bunch of seeds in the ground and see what sprung up. Sometimes it was acting and sometimes it was music. But whatever it was I continued to plant.

If I never won a Grammy, I would be satisfied, if in fact I could help people. I don't say that because it sounds like something cool to say.

We can't plan life.All we can do is be available for it.

In my family, there was not an abundance of wealth, but there was an abundance of love. So there was always humor, and there was joy and there was comfort and there was this environment just to have a good time.

I was hopeless, now I'm on Hope Road.

Who you going to tell when the repercussions spin, showing off your ass because you think it's a trend.

See no one loves you more than me ... and no one ever will

Anything that is not growing is dead.

I used to play my records aloud until one night my mother was like, "This is too loud. I'm not having it," and so I put on headphones. But the headphones didn't stretch all the way to my bed from the record player, so I had to sleep on the floor in order to hear the records. I slept on the floor right next to the record player until I was probably 19 years old.

Let optimists rule the world.

I sit here before you trying to figure out how to pay a tax debt? If that's not like enough to slavery, I don't know.

It's emotional warfare telling the people we love, the most, the truth about ourselves.

God teaches me about reality, so when he tells me to do something, I do, because I'm led to.

I wouldn't even hold my kids sometimes because I didn't want them to spit up on me when I was dressed for an awards show.

You could get the money, you can get the power, but keep your eyes on the final hour.

If you love something and if you're committed and diligent - the things happen!

Reality is easy. It's deception that's the hard work.

I need to be surrounded by people as passionate and as dedicated as I am.

I have inner peace. It's a different person.

From the first time someone says, Who do you think you are? we learn how to repress.

I get out, I get out of all your boxes. I get out, you can't hold me in these chains. I'll get out. Father free me from this bondage. Knowin' my condition is the reason I must change

It could all be so simple, but you'd rather make it hard, loving you is like a battle, and we both end up with scars,

See fantasy is what people want, but reality is what they need. And I just retired from the fantasy part.

I have a couple of all-time favorites: Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flack, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell.

Everybody has a choice. I am not here to shove my light down everybody's throat. For those who don't want it, I have nothing to defend.

Nobody's going to force me to do something against my will. What do I owe anybody that I should submit my will to them?