Tracy McMillan Quotes

I think my life actually changed at 40. That's when you realize you can't ride the fence anymore. You either have to get on one side or the other. I think some of my best years were between 40 and 50: I got my priorities straight and life is good to me now. It's only other people who say, "God, she's 50 years old!" as if I'm over the hill. I feel like I just started.

There were a lot of people, I found, who'd rather watch me live my life than live their own life.

I've never wanted to be the ingenue. Now that I'm getting into my forties, I think my time as a woman has arrived; I think I might have a new moment in my career. I have that drive left - just for a little while.

My life is better with every year of living it.

We have to program the mind of the public that age is not ugly. Age is just age. Wake up, American children, and stop listening to other people's voices. Know yourself, be true to yourself and make a contribution. It took me half my life to know myself. I listened to other people's opinions and took them as gospel.

Everything I've done has been personally fun, important, and meaningful to me.

My thirties merged into my forties, and I sort of gradually realised that I don't really want children. Now I'm glad I don't have them. Part of that is because I have my books.

If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.

Wonderful things happen when you turn 50: you change perspective. You ask, 'Who am I? What do I want to do with my life? What have I not done that I want to do?'

Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do.

My forties are the best time I have ever gone through.

Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know theyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at.

The more we search for ourselves, the less likely we are to find ourselves; and the more we search for God, and to serve our fellow-men, the more profoundly will we become acquainted with ourselves, and the more inwardly assured. This is one of the great spiritual laws of life.

When you're younger, you tend to be reckless about trying to find out who you are and what you can do and should do. But as you get older you become more accepting of yourself, and with that comes greater contentment.

The world's most sensible person and the biggest idiot both stay within us. The worst part is, you can't even tell who is who.

I don't want to be lofty when I say this, but I don't know what a success is any more. I know how we define it, but that was a moment where I went, "Wait, who am I?" You could feel the business, in particular, kind of go "He's all right, let's go over here." I started to go, "Wait, I know why I love to do this." I think I got off track in why I love to do it.

To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.

I have never seen myself as leading for others. What's important is that I know who I am. Not completely. But I'm coming around third base.

The purpose of life is to know yourself, create yourself, experience yourself as Who You Really Are. There is no other reason to do anything.

I am convinced that most people do not grow up...We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias.

The longer I live, the more I realize that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time!

The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born.

Success only means doing something sincerely and wholeheartedly. I think life is a process. Through the ages, the end of heroes is the same as ordinary men. They all died and gradually faded away in the memory of man. But when we are still alive, we have to understand ourselves, discover ourselves and express ourselves. In this way, we can progress, but we may not be successful.

Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the differences between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.

A young man's ambition - to get along in the world and make a place for himself - half your life goes that way, till you're 45 or 50. Then, if you're lucky, you make terms with life, you get released.