Erykah Badu quotes:

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  • I have advice for people - period - who are in unhealthy relationships: Follow your heart. It will get you to where you need to be. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's easy, the places that your heart takes you. But continue to follow it. Where the train leads you - you'll get there.

  • I thought the Billie Holiday comparison was beautiful. I think, Wow, what a wonderful, creative, helpful spirit. She's someone who wanted to help others by sharing her emotion. That's what I do, too, so I think that's a great comparison.

  • I've had two children. I've had three boyfriends. I've had a lot of things happen that can change your opinions and values and philosophies.

  • I'm a complete human being. I'm very emotional and loving. I feel, I hurt, I give, I take, and also I think. I analyze. I'm a sociologist, anthropologist.

  • I have the ability to sing with emotion and feeling, but if you say I sound like Billie Holiday, that's cool. Let's look at who Billie was: she was this person, this singer, this beautiful diva who could move the audience with the slightest gesture of her hand.

  • I am not systematic at all when it comes to religion. I just love life. And I'm not judgmental. And I'm a vegetarian.

  • What does music mean to me? I don't think I would really be much without it, without it coming through me. It's my means of communication, my means of growth, my means of transportation from one point in my life to another.

  • I think a lot of people have lost respect for the individual, you know, the individual, the person who doesn't conform.

  • I consider my musical ability to be a gift from the Creator. It's not that I try to work hard or nothing like that, it's a gift, it was given to me, and I appreciate it.

  • Music and the music business are two different things.

  • What I work hard at doing is staying on a path of being kind and showing and proving that I'm a good person to society. That's hard. The talent, that's a gift. I just came here like that.

  • I'm not trying to win an award for being the best vegetarian, just want to be healthy. Take a salt bath. Do things that my parents were never able to do. I'm blessed to do anything I want, so I decide to take the best care of my body and my family in the same way. Holistically. Vitally.

  • From then on, I realized this is what I want to do, what I'm supposed to do: Giving energy and receiving it back through applause. I love it. That's my world. I love it. I enjoy it. I live for it.

  • The music business is motivated by money. Music is motivated by energy and feelings.

  • Personally, I don't choose any particular religion or symbol or group of words or teachings to define me. That's between me and the most high. You know, my higher self. The Creator.

  • I'm a Pisces, so I'm a very closed-book kind of person.

  • I don't have any particular thing I do ritualistically. I do the same thing every day. I get up. Drink a lot of water. Have a wheatgrass shot. Drink some green juice. Eat as healthy as I can.

  • It's almost like a lot of black people in America, a lot of young black men, are born with this cloud over their heads. It's their penitentiary cloud, this philosophy we all have, that it's harder for us.

  • When you're in a relationship you want it to work. My parents did, I did. But we are not taught how to make it work.

  • I'm kind of a recluse when it comes to going outside.

  • Man, I don't want to have nothing to do with computers. I don't want the government in my business.

  • Hip-hop was created out of necessity. We needed to create some digitized things to help us understand what we were feeling.

  • Anything that had to do with art I been doing all my life. It was a gift. It's nothing I work real hard at doing.

  • I'm a woman who has gone through many heartaches, enough to dedicate my whole life to trying to figure them out.

  • No one chooses to raise children alone.

  • Artists need some kind of stimulating experience a lot of times, which crystallizes when you sing about it or paint it or sculpt it. You literally mold the experience the way you want. It's therapy.

  • The kind of music or the kind of arrangements that I do, the kind of musicians I choose, is just what I like to hear.

  • I don't have one song that sounds like another one in my entire catalog.

  • I'm a performance artist first; I'm a recording artist second.

  • And I figured out that the reason I couldn't get through the day as well as I can now is because I had too many things on my mind, on my plate, you know, for one person to have. So I started to eliminate some of the things that were too heavy to carry and unnecessary.

  • Hopefully my music is medicine, some type of antidote for something or some kind of explanation or just to feel good.

  • I try to be honest and I keep moving.

  • I grew up with all mothers, all women. I come from a long line of matriarchs, very strong women.

  • Oh, yeah, I see the world differently now. Actually, when I first had the baby, I was breast-feeding him for two years straight. So we were together for two years of his life, every single day, all hours of the day. So I was two people, and I eventually morphed back into one.

  • Hip-hop is the people. What the people are moving toward is what hip-hop is. I think people are moving toward a freer way of thinking. Openness.

  • I'm in training to become a midwife. I'm almost there and before I know it I'll be able to open my own practice, if that's what I desire.

  • I'm free. I just do what I want, say what I want, say how I feel, and I don't try to hurt nobody. I just try to make sure that I don't compromise my art in any kind of way, and I think people respect that.

  • I know the community mostly for its art and culture... and of course its food, I eat at their restaurants." "They make you feel like taking off your shoes... it feels like home.

  • There are millions and billions of atoms of memory of all kinds of musical themes in me.

  • I encourage breaking free of self inflicted holding pens. I encourage the use of intelligence in every decision. I encourage creating.

  • As Erykah Badu, it has nothing to do with me, the way I look, my hair wrap, my style, it's about you and what you feel for my music. If I can make you feel like the way that people who influenced me made me feel, that's completion.

  • A lot of people have dementia, which is great, because then they don't recognize me.

  • Vegan food is soul food in its truest form. Soul food means to feed the soul. And, to me, your soul is your intent. If your intent is pure, you are pure.

  • What makes me furious, not just because we're in an interview, but I don't like when writers take your words and put them somewhere else, in the wrong context in their own article about you.

  • Well, if you look at all of the cultures in America, this is a great opportunity for us to really get acquainted with the rest of the world. America is the only place you can do that, but we don't have sense enough to take advantage of that.

  • A home birth is about being able to create exactly what you want, because it's such a violent moment inside of the body that you want everything else to be as beautiful as it can be.

  • My work as a doula also extends all the way to the end of life. I sit at the bedsides of people who are passing on in hospices or nursing homes, for the people and families who want that kind of thing.

  • During childbirth and hospice I'll sing gospel songs that my grandma taught me when I was younger, or something I've made up, or I'll hum. I just play things that I think the audience will like.

  • I love to leave the interpretation of my music up to the listener. It's fun to see what they'll say it is

  • Marvin Gaye is one of my favorite revolutionaries. He spoke from his heart, his mind. That's what I want to do.

  • My eyes are green, Cause I eat a lot of vegetables, It don't have nothing to do with your new friend

  • They usually have a piano in every nursing home, and I always wanted to perform for whoever would listen when I learned something. I grew to understand very early that a lot of these people who are in nursing homes are elderly and don't have a lot of things that give them joy from day to day.

  • I grew up listening to old soul

  • I'm pretty mutable as a human being, period - if you put me on Pluto, I can figure it out.

  • I have a master plan as an artist. I've always said I'm not going to be punching nobody's clock. I will work as an artist to survive in this world.

  • All I want to do is give the world my heart... Record label tryina make me compromise my art.

  • I started performing at two or three on a tape recorder, one of those little flat recorders where you just push play and record.

  • Never knew what a friendship was, Never knew how to really love, You can't be what I need you to, & I don't know why I fuck with you

  • I really can't say what inspires me the most, because I'm inspired by just about everything. My feelings and relationships, my family, Scooby-Doo. Opinion of my work. Everything. Not just one thing.

  • I have so much music that I do. Just like how a visual artist is always sketching something but they might not share it, I'm always writing songs or coming up with melodic lines on piano or guitar. It's therapy. It's always happening.

  • But now I realize that this record business really needs me. No one else is trying to take a chance or do something different.

  • Hip-hop is not something we do, it's something we live. It's the way we dress, the way we talk... everybody bobbing to the same beat. It's a culture, and you have to find your own place in that culture. Top 10 or Top 40 can't dictate that. They can only dictate what's marketable.

  • I'm a recovering undercover over-lover.

  • I don't feel like I need to preach to the world or nothing like that. I just feel like I share what I say, and if listeners get it, they get it. And I never underestimate the audience's ability to feel me.

  • I love watching Rihanna in fashion. I like to see her take chances and risks. I like seeing Naomi Campbell in the forefront. They're both women who stand out and use their bodies as canvases to introduce this functional art to the world. They carry it in a way that is very inspiring.

  • Being honest is my job. That's what music is for me.

  • I don't sing melodically. Rhyme pattern is how I sing. I also write like a lyricist or an MC because that's what I was before I was a singer. I just took those elements and put them into music.

  • I knew it would happen. I knew I'd be No. 1. I'm a new artist; I don't know the rules. Nobody told me it wouldn't happen.

  • I'll dabble here and there in different forms of the art, but the label has me locked down like a slave so, of course, I'll be doing albums during this time.

  • I'm not satisfied with the explanations I get from tv or from school.

  • I love to leave the interpretation of my music up to the listener. It's fun to see what they'll say it is.

  • Peace and Blessings manifest with every lesson learned. If your knowledge were your wealth then it would be well earned.

  • Be you. Make sure you're saying something when you're saying something. It's important to sound like you, to feel like you, to be like you. Be you.

  • I think people who vibrate at the same frequency, vibrate toward each other. They call it - in science - sympathetic vibrations.

  • I'm only in competition with my last level.

  • I live in a queendom, ruled by a womb-iverse,

  • They play it safe, are quick to assassinate what they do not understand. They move in packs ingesting more and more fear with every act of hate on one another. They feel most comfortable in groups, less guilt to swallow. They are us. This is what we have become. Afraid to respect the individual. A single person within a circumstance can move one to change. To love herself. To evolve

  • The light always shows on the outside if you are striving to be good on the inside.

  • Following your heart also means eliminating the things that no longer evolve you.

  • If you invite negativity in, you have to feed it and hang out with it. Best not to invite it in.

  • My hair is an aesthetic choiceâ?¦ At the same time, how you wear your hair is a political statement as well.

  • I create my own calm and I keep my balance, because I know that it's not really me, by myself... The Creator always gives me the energy.

  • Time to eliminate things that no longer evolve me.

  • I know that I want to concentrate more on my inside-pretty than my outside-pretty, because thats gonna go away. But if your inside is beautiful, it never wears away. The light always shows on the outside if you are striving to be good inside.

  • Don't let anybody infiltrate your dream

  • We as Black people have to tell our own stories. We have to document our history. When we allow someone else to document our history the history becomes twisted and we get written out. We get our noses blown off.

  • Better think while it's still legal.

  • I had the opportunity, as a child, to grow up in a community center where I was exposed to theater, music, art, and computer science; things that I would have never had the opportunity to even meet had it not been for those people taking time out of their schedules, helping us as children to travel all over the world while sitting in a gymnasium. That's what I did before I was a musician, before I was a recording artist, I was a teacher and a community leader.

  • I think [ fashion philosophy] it's about your smile and your smell.

  • I was born to make mistakes, I ain't scared to take the weight.

  • I strongly believe that the more positive my vibration is, the clearer my message will be. I keep my negative thoughts from infiltrating my pathway and my dreams. Other people's thoughts are none of my business.

  • I don't know why, it's just what I feel inside, the thoughts that I sing about. It's just my truth. Sometimes my emotions can be mistaken for messages.

  • So the most natural thing to me is to stay as pure to or real to or close to who I am as possible.

  • We lock ourselves into our own philosophies, our own religions, our own walks of life, and if we fail, we condemn ourselves and then we get sick.

  • Art is the absence of fear.

  • What singing means to me, I never did consider myself a singer, I just let people watch me feel music and how it comes through me. I've worked on it and practiced a lot. I mean, music, I dance to it, and singing is just one way of getting it out of me.

  • The Man That Knowz Something Knowz That He Knowz Nothing At All.

  • Now keep in mind that I'm an artist and I'm sensitive about my sh*t

  • Poor is the new black.

  • I'm more like an oven than a microwave,

  • I don't require sex for happiness - I need companionship. I need a partner I can depend on, that I can love and grow with.

  • You don't have to believe everything you think.

  • We were all born, and we all came to the music business with everything we had. Some of us just don't get a chance. Now there's a lot of other people like myself, indeed, who are getting heard worldwide. That gives other artists a chance.

  • The reason why you don't see people looking like me is because I don't encourage that. I encourage you to be you.

  • I just keep going. When the water's too still, I start splashing around and things jump out of the water.

  • I got a call from a mutual friend of ours, Charles King, who's also the executive producer. [Steven Caple Jr and I] had a conversation about it. I read it. We kind of finished each other's sentences when it came to the nuances and personality flaws that the character had, and some stereotypes and things we were trying to stay away from. We agreed on that as well. He just kind of allowed me to run rampant with the ideas. As we paced ourselves through, we developed Turquoise.

  • I view my hair and clothes as functional art...

  • My fifth mother is Mother Nature - the things I had to learn on my own, the understanding I had to come to and still have to come to as a young woman, as a responsible mother, a responsible granddaughter and child. She teaches me willpower, honesty, and the things we need to heal ourselves from moment to moment.

  • I planned my success. I knew it was going to happen.

  • [The Land] is a film that just happens to be directed and written by a Puerto Rican guy with a black dad. It seemed like a very natural, human interaction between people who all just came from one common cesspool of bad luck.

  • The girls just like to be in the shoes. They like to scuff up the floors and walk around in high-heeled shoes that are too big for them, all over the house.

  • I have a Pinterest, and if you look there you'll see the things I really like and adore, have crushes on, and there's a lot of stuff from Riccardo's [Tisci] line on there.

  • I relate to that - he inspires me across the board. His music inspires me and reminds me to maintain honesty in the things that I do, to have an absence of fear. Listening to Earl Sweatshirt's music is like therapy to me.

  • My paternal grandmother gave me the courage to investigate things and not take things at face value or judge people by what I first imagine them to be.

  • Honey isn't really that good for you.

  • I'd rather see a person with a natural mind and processed mind than a processed mind and a natural head.

  • I can be Erykah the human being more than the celebrity.

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