Lauryn Hill Quotes

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

I was very confused. I didn't understand the difference between rebellion against God and rebellion against the system that's not God.

Now I may have faith/ to make mountains fall/ But if I lack love/ then I am nothin' at all

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.

We have to make sure the music and the message and the words and all the elements come through in our songs and every time we appear in public.

For the past several years, I have remained what others would consider underground. I did this in order to build a community of people, like-minded in their desire for freedom and the right to pursue their goals and lives without being manipulated and controlled by a media protected military industrial complex with a completely different agenda.

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.

I wouldn't try to put myself in a box or put God in a box.

I never did anything I'm really ashamed of.

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.

Life is continued work. It's constant learning. The whole concept of retirement I don't even buy into. We should constantly be working. Maybe not physically working, but we could be spiritually, emotionally working toward bettering ourselves and bettering the lives of others around us.

My concept of successful living is escaping the matrix.

Once you compromise yourself in one way, you compromise yourself in another way. And you've just opened the door to compromise, mediocrity, settling.

Since those who believe they need a hero/celebrity outnumber the actual heroes/celebrities, people feel safe and comfortably justified in numbers, committing egregious crimes in the name of the greater social ego. Ironically diminishing their own true hero-celebrity nature in the process.

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?

I can give away everything I posses, but am without love, and I have no happiness

It's funny how money change a situation.

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.

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

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.

When I was working, and when I was making substantial amounts of money, I always filed and paid my taxes. This only stopped, when it was necessary to withdraw from society, in order to guarantee the safety and well-being of myself and my family.

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.

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

In my travels all over the world, I have come to realize that what distinguishes one child from another is not ability, but access. Access to education, access to opportunity, access to love.

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 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.

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'm trying to open up my range and really sing more. 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.

I knew his life deserved a chance/But everybody told me to be smart/Look at your career they said/Lauren, baby use your head/But instead I chose to use my heart.

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.

Anything that is not growing is dead.

I went to Jamaica for six months, and in Jamaica there was a lot of stillness.

The honor to me has less to do with the award. To me that translates in the relationship that I have with the audience, and if my music is helpful to them, that's the award.

I get really afraid of those little comforts, those things that make us feel like we did something great, because I've done nothing. I've done nothing. I mean that sincerely.

I play my enemies like a game of chess

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

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!

If I'd known white people were going to buy my last album, I never would have recorded it.

I had an economic system imposed on me.

Never underestimate those who you scar.

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.

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

When you're young and everything dramatic is exciting, you start to believe that hype that, in order to be an artist, you have to suffer. I've graduated from that school.

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.

I like a brother that cuts to the chase.

We call ourselves creators and we just copy.

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

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.