Lauryn Hill Quotations

You might win some, but you just lost one.

That strong mother doesn't tell her cub, Son, stay weak so the wolves can get you. She says, Toughen up, this is reality we are living in.

As musicians and artists, it's important we have an environment - and I guess when I say environment, I really mean the industry, that really nurtures these gifts. Oftentimes, the machine can overlook the need to take care of the people who produce the sounds that have a lot to do with the health and well-being of society.

We call ourselves creators and we just copy.

I don't know anybody that's not emotionally unstable or schizophrenic.

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

Hip-Hop isn't just music, it is also a spiritual movement of the blacks! You can't just call Hip-Hop a trend!

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.

The less I have, the freer I am to do whatever I want to do.

People need to understand that the Lauryn Hill they were exposed to in the beginning was all that was allowed in that arena at the time. I had to step away for the sake of the machine. I was being way too compromised. I felt uncomfortable having to smile in someone's face when I really didn't like them or know them well enough to like.

You don't know how much artists go through to make it look so easy. It's all in the practice.

When I have a creative insight, there is a high. I think back in the day, I made music as much as I did because it made me feel so good. I think you could argue that there is a creative addiction - but, you know, the healthy kind.

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.

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.

I had to confront my fears and master my every demonic thought about inferiority, insecurity, or the fear of being black, young, and gifted in this Western culture.

The danger I faced was not accepted as reasonable grounds for deferring my tax payments, as authorities, who despite being told all of this, still chose to pursue action against me, as opposed to finding an alternative solution.

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

What was freely given to me, I freely give.

We don't want people to have expectations of us, but then we have expectations of everybody else.

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?

Be honest, brutally honest. That is what's going to maintain relationships.

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

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

Everything we do should be a result of our gratitude for what God has done for us.

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.

Over-commercialization and its resulting restrictions and limitations can be very damaging and distorting to the inherent nature of the individual. I did not deliberately abandon my fans, nor did I deliberately abandon any responsibilities.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 tried to manipulate and control people, and I harbored resentment. I wanted to be forgiven, but I wouldn't forgive others.

I never did anything I'm really ashamed of.

I got into direct confrontation with everybody I love.

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.

Wow, this is so amazing. I thank God. This is crazy because this is hip-hop music.

Like Cain and Abel, Caesar and Brutus, Jesus and Judas, back stabbers do this

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.

If they only showed Love, they would own love.

I'm a mess but God is dealing with me every day. That's what all these songs are about: problem, cause and solution.

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 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 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 had to learn the hard way some really important life lessons. There was really no one there to say, don't do this or don't do that.

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.

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.

I rarely listen to the music for the sheer pleasure. I'm listening for the tool, I'm listening for the instrument, I'm listening for the art.

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?"

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.

Love and this close-knit family structure really helped to give me the confidence. To know that you have family to go back to is a help. It doesn't always happen biologically. Sometimes God gives you family in other forms, but I was very blessed. I have a very strong biological family.

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

If the entire week is a battlefield, reading the Bible is sort of like that parachute with the box of reserves that come in the middle of the war: food and water and the toothbrush and toilet paper.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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 know there are certain gifts that each of us have. The gifts you don't have to worry about so much, because God gave them to us. It's the living, it's the life, it's the now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The work is constant. There's a time for rest, but I don't believe in getting comfortable just because everyone says you've arrived.

We should constantly be aspiring to reach higher and higher and higher. We should never be comfortable where we are.

Every time that God navigates my ship, there's nothing cerebral going on. There's very little thought. It's almost as if I have the directions. Every time I try to do it myself, I'm conjuring up my own concoction and trying.

I find, even though it's raining, I just go outside. I look outside and I'm just so blessed to see it and to experience it, because for such a long time I was just indoors.

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.

My parents had a love for music. There were so many records, so much music constantly being played. My mother played piano, my father sang, and we were always surrounded in music.

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

Hypocrites always wanna play innocent

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,

As painful as this thing has been I just can't be with no one else. See I know what we've got to do. You let go, and I'll let go too. 'Cause no one's hurt me more than you And no one ever will.

I believe God will make a way.

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.

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.

Sometimes we all need to take time and give thanks.

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

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.

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.

We have these images, these icons before us that are not reality.

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

Our first album was a stupid mistake by the record company. They tried to sell us as an alternative act. A big mistake!

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

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

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!

I am up there onstage alone with that guitar. I don't have to consider no one else and whether they are comfortable. I need very little.

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

I hope that by people seeing the result of freedom that they'll want some, too.

I like a brother that cuts to the chase.

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

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

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

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

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

I play my enemies like a game of chess

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.

In my life the most influential people are people who are sort of brought to me, as opposed to people I seek out.