“Bliss is a beautiful destination, but you can often only reach its shores after a turning point. It’s as if the universe is testing you to be sure you are strong enough to make it through the murky waters, not just the serene ones, so that you can move to a new and unknown place in yourself.”
Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 140)
“A soul mate connection isn’t just an awareness. It’s a deep sense of knowing, a wave of intuition that permeates your every pore. All the cells in your body rise up on their tiptoes. You don’t see this feeling coming. You can’t prepare for it. You might even try to push it away, as I did. And yet it always surges back, each time with greater force, sweeping you up in its mighty current, thrusting you toward a beautiful shore unknown.”
Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 135)
“We don’t draw loved ones into our lives coincidentally. They’re there to shine a light on our unfinished emotional business, to reveal to us our deepest tendencies. And as my life is proving to me even now, those patterns appear time and time again, often cleverly disguised. And they’ll keep right on showing up until we’re willing to truly look at them.”
Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 126)
“You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.”
Annie Dillard, Sunbeams (Page 9)
“Seek not to follow in the footsteps of men of old; seek what they sought.”
Matsuo Basho, Sunbeams (Page 9)
“A wise person knows what’s inside their circle of control and what is outside of it. The good news is that it’s pretty easy to remember what is inside our control. According to the Stoics, the circle of control contains just one thing: YOUR MIND. That’s right, even your physical body isn’t completely within the circle. After all, you could be struck with a physical illness or impairment at any moment. You could be traveling in a foreign country and be thrown in jail. But this is all good news because it drastically reduces the amount of things that you need to think about. There is clarity in simplicity.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 21)
“When you don’t speak the truth for years at a time, the words left unspoken slowly leak the air out of your connection. Even if, years later, you are ready to say what you couldn’t earlier, the moment has passed. The details and circumstances have faded from memory, and yet the emotions linger. And then the day finally comes when you no longer recognize the person you first loved.”
Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 124)
“I wasted so much energy nursing my bitterness, trying to get back at him and hoping he’d experience as much heartache as I had. But the whole time, I was the one hurting. I was the one who, by living in that negative energy, drew even more of it to myself. It was so backward.”
Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 121)
“Death is a gift meant to wake up the living, to nudge us toward a life of purpose and intention.”
Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 106)
“If the Egyptians had so capably built their temples and pyramids without the benefit of modern architectural tools, then I, the daughter of this great civilization, must be capable of more than I knew. We all are. Anything we can conceive of can be built. Perhaps not through our efforts alone, but also by the generations of dreamers whose feet will rest on our shoulders.”
Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 105)
“What you focus on expands. If you focus on the goodness in your life, you create more of it. And if you live with an open palm rather than a closed fist, you leave room for immeasurable blessings to flow through your hands.”
Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 81)
Money, like all life, is an energy exchange. You give yourself over to whatever you’re passionate about, and what comes back to you is energy in the form of monetary compensation. You attract more or less of what you want by how you choose to interact with it, as well as what you believe about yourself. Do you truly feel you deserve what you’re asking for? Are you worth it? How you answer impacts what comes your way.”
Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 81)
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
A Course In Miracles, Sunbeams (Page 7)
“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Sunbeams (Page 7)
“Serenity and stability are the results of your choices and judgment, not your environment. If you seek to avoid all disruptions to tranquility—other people, external events, stress—you will never be successful. Your problems will follow you wherever you run and hide. But if you seek to avoid the harmful and disruptive judgments that cause those problems, then you will be stable and steady wherever you happen to be.”
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic (Page 19)
“For me, the utter elation of this whole period came from the world’s embrace of my creation, my music. No feeling compares to having others love what you love, and then enthusiastically sharing it with others. Fame for the sake of fame had never been the dream. But spreading light is a pleasure I’ll always live for.”
Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 78)
“Nothing but uncertainty is certain. Circumstances come together, only to fall apart moments or months later. And then, in a flash, we must rise up and regain our footing. In the rearview mirror, I now see so clearly what escaped me then: It’s not that the ground underneath me was suddenly shifting; it’s that it is never still. That’s part of the work of my journey—getting comfortable with life’s groundlessness.”
Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 66)
“I’m often asked where my melodies and lyrics come from. I may never fully comprehend how a song sprouts from nothingness into existence, and truthfully, I’m not tempted to decode the mystery. I hope to be constantly surprised, in amazement of how the tiny seed of a possible chord or lyric miraculously springs to life. That unexplainable process, that alchemy, is part of what separates art from logic and reason. I don’t create from a set of rules or formulas. I tap into my true feelings and experiences and allow them to guide me.”
Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 60)
“We adjust ourselves to fit, to adapt to others’ ideas of who we should be. We shift ourselves not in sweeping pivots, but in movements so tiny that they are hardly perceptible, even in our view. Years can pass before we finally discover that, after handing over our power piece by small piece, we no longer even look like ourselves.”
Alicia Keys, More Myself (Page 56)