Angelina Jolie Quotes

Cancer has given me a dose of humility. I'm much more empathetic. It's a club I would rather not have joined, but it is a club.

Nobody's life is a bed of roses. We all have crosses to bear, and we all just do our best. I would never claim to have the worst situation. There are many widows, and many people dying of AIDS, many people killed in Lebanon, people starving all over the planet. So we have to count our lucky stars.

As a child, I didn't know what I didn't have. I'm thankful for the challenges early on in my life because now I have a perspective on the world and kind of know what's important.

We need the compassion and the courage to change the conditions that support our suffering. Those conditions are things like ignorance, bitterness, negligence, clinging, and holding on.

Cancer opens many doors. One of the most important is your heart.

I love New York. I was sad, depressed and incredibly moved by our fellow countrymen and what they've done. I wanted to give people a chance to see something funny, have a distraction.

I think of myself as quite a confused kind of person, because I think there's so many great things about the world, but there are so many awful things too. I feel very guilty a lot of the time about enjoying my life so much when there are people living in such misery.

Working with UNICEF made me grow up and recognize how fortunate I am.

I have a great deal of joy in my life, and I'm very fortunate. That combination makes you aware of just how wonderful life can be on the one hand and how dreadful it can be for people on the other. You can't be happy in isolation.

I am very fortunate. I am a glass-half-full eternal optimist type to the point of being a moron. But I would never presume to know how hard it goes for others. How, for some people, just getting though the day is an incredible effort that can hardly be borne.

I know the world is mean, that there is so much suffering on the planet that none of us can imagine. I often think of those who have nothing, who have to suffer every day, so a winner, a game, set, match will never give me immense joy, only satisfaction.

Apart from my children, spending time with refugees was the greatest gift... the greatest life lesson I could ever receive.

And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.

Acknowledgement: Understanding and compassion for others and their suffering is the next step. Put yourself in the shoes of people who don't have the luxury of being wasteful.

It doesn't escape me for one moment that so much joy in my life is thanks to so much pain in someone else's.

I've spent quite a bit of my life as a meditation teacher and writer commending the strengths of love and compassion.

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.

The good news of suffering is that it brings us to the end of ourselves - a purpose it has certainly served in my life. It brings us to the place of honesty, which is the place of desperation, which is the place of faith, which is the place of freedom.

Before my accident I was a little too... selfish and self-absorbed and for me, to now be at the place where I can kinda give back and inspire people. I'm blessed. I'm really blessed.

My illness has taught me something about the nature of humanity, love, brotherhood and relationships that I never understood, and probably never would have. So, from that standpoint, there is some truth and good in everything.

I've certainly had a lot of experiences in my life where I was much too self-centered.

Lord, where we are wrong, make us willing to change; where we are right, make us easy to live with.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

I wouldn't be honest if I told you that in some moment of my life I had a lot of rage - probably hate - I'm not sure of hate, but rage. But you know what happens is that then you realize you cannot do to others what you think nobody has to do to anybody. Life is important for me and not any kind of life, quality too of life.

You have to find the peace and patience within yourself to be a model and an example to others and not judge.