Oprah's favourite quotes

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”   Ralph Waldo Emerson

Generosity 

"That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing."
—Simone de Beauvoir 

"The only gift is a portion of thyself."
—Ralph Waldo Emerson 

"Giving is a necessity sometimes...more urgent, indeed, than having."
—Margaret Lee Runbeck 

"We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give."
—Winston Churchill 

"If you knew what I know about the power of giving, you would not let a single meal pass without sharing it in some way."
—Buddha 

"The habit of giving only enhances the desire to give."
—Walt Whitman 

"There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one's gifts to those one loves most."
—Mary Sarton 

"Anything that is of value in life only multiplies when it is given."
—Deepak Chopra 

"It is well to give when asked, but it is better to give unasked, through understanding."
—Kahlil Gibran 

"Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within."
—Franz Kafka 

Trust 

"Just trust yourself then you will know how to live."
—Goethe, Faust 

"I could be whatever I wanted to be if I trusted that music, that song, that vibration of God that was inside of me."
—Shirley Maclaine, It's All In The Playing 

"It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself."
—Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear 

"Trust yourself. Think for yourself. Act for yourself. Speak for yourself. Be yourself. Imitation is suicide."
—Marva Collins 

"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance 

Reading 

"We read, frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own."
—Harold Bloom, literary critic 

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city."
—Anne Michaels, citing a Hebrew saying, in Fugitive Pieces 

"I cannot live without books."
—Thomas Jefferson 

"When I only begin to read, I forget I'm on this world. It lifts me on wings with high thoughts."
—Anzia Yezierska, novelist

Self-Esteem

"Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right."
—Henry Ford 

"If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me."
—Ralph Waldo Emerson 

"You can be pleased with nothing when you are not pleased with yourself."
—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 

"I was brought up to believe that how I saw myself was more important than how others saw me."
—Anwar el-Sadat 

"The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself."
—Mark Twain 

"I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship."
—Louisa May Alcott 

"I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself."
—Michel Eyquem de Montaigne