ONCE THE LIGHT BULB CAME ON FOR ME, MY CALLING BECAME TO CREATE SHOWS THAT ENCOURAGE AND INSPIRE AS MUCH AS THEY ENTERAIN.
–OPRAH
“Breakthroughs occur when you suddenly see something on the other side of the clutter that you desperately, vividly want. So let me give you an assignment. Ask yourself what is on the other side of your clutter? Are you ready to embrace it? Because the skills it takes to get organized are simple. Beyond that clutter, I promise you’ll find the space and the time to fulfill your dreams.”
“Aha! I got it. Working out slows the aging process and makes you more vital. Aha! Aha! Aha!”
“I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to make people comfortable, even though I’m not exactly sure why they aren’t…I don’t work anymore at trying to make sure others like me. I’ve given up on that. This is who I am.”
“The older I get, the more I think you must be kind. That’s why I’ll probably be less and less of a good interviewer. Sometimes you have to ask the tough questions. I can’t be quite as brash as I used to be. I know it hurts. I’ve become a kinder person.”
“I used to be intimidated by celebrities. I remember early in my career, when I was about twenty-four…I had five minutes, tops, to establish a connection with the then unknown [actor] Robin Williams. Robin, who may have been wilder than he is today, was all over the place…I didn’t know what to do, but knew instinctively that a normal conversation was not going to happen…So I took a deep breath and allowed myself to be carried by the flow of his excited energy…It’s a lesson I never forgot: Find the flow and follow it.”
“I used to struggle to put a monetary value on my work…When I started my own firm, I found it so tough to bill for my services that I asked people to pay me what they thought my work was worth. To my amazement, people paid me more than I would ever have dreamed of billing them. It was an eye-opener. If others valued me more than I valued myself, I knew I needed a serious attitude adjustment.”
“I remind myself, while feeling afraid, to love life anyway, to retain the certain knowledge that I will die someday and use that to open to the preciousness of what I see and feel right in front of me. Now I might feel afraid but am determined to have that fear serve as a counterpoint to my tendency to procrastinate—if I have to apologize, tell someone ‘I love you,’ try to make a difference, I need to do it without delay.”
“My intention to please was creating a logical effect. Others were so pleased that they’d often come back and ask me to do more! So I decided to become aware of my every intention in order to create a different outcome. That meant doing only those things that came from the truth of who I am—and only doing that which pleased me to do for others.”
“After I had [my daughter] Malia, I began to prioritize exercise because I realized that my happiness is tied to how I feel about myself. I want my girls to see a mother who takes care of herself, even if that means I have to get up at four thirty so I can do a workout.”
“We’re liberated from being better. I’m not going to have a better day, a more magical moment, than the first time I heard my daughter giggle. Tomorrow’s not going to be better than that. So why invest in better? If God spoke to me right now and told me that I would never have greater stimuli than I have right now, that wouldn’t worry me. It’s all about how you celebrate the stimuli you have.”
“First, I had to figure out how to ask [my future wife] out on a date. Actually, first I had to ask someone what her name was—Melania, a beautiful name—because I wasn’t sure how to approach her myself. Considering my reputation for being anything but shy, my reaction might sound hard to believe, but it was a real aha moment for me: I realized that even after you’ve done a lot of living, you can still be amazed by what can turn up in life—that it’s possible to discover things you hadn’t thought existed.”
“My big light bulb moment on relationships came the first time I talked with marriage therapist Harville Hendrix. He introduced me to the imago theory—in essence, he says it’s not a coincidence that you’ve attracted your partner; that person is there to help you do the work of recovering from old wounds. That show changed me. I saw relationships not solely as the kind of romantic pursuit our society celebrates but as a spiritual partnership that’s meant to change how you see yourself and the world.”
“I try very hard to go easy on the firm conclusions. These days I settle for feeling only 85 percent sure about most things, most of the time. I believe that is keeping me sane, and I also believe that it’s keeping me human. In fact, I’m 85 percent sure of it.”
“Most of the time when I look back on what I’ve done, I think, ‘Did I do that?’ And you know what I say to myself? Why didn’t I enjoy it more? Was I working too hard to see it?…What I’m trying to do now, before it’s too late, is to finally smell the roses. I know it’s a cliché, but I want to enjoy it. I want to get rid of the alarm clock every day. I’ve done enough. Time is what it’s all about.”
“I made a conscious decision not to move into my house and close the gate as I have for so many years…My life has a new, unexpected layer. I thought I was through making friends. But much to my surprise, I’ve found myself looking forward to hanging out, laughing, talking serious, and just connecting and embracing one another as part of the circle. It’s added new meaning, a feeling of community I didn’t even know I was missing.”
“I don’t have to be perfect. All I have to do is show up and enjoy the messy, imperfect, and beautiful journey of my life. It’s a trip more wonderful than I could have imagined.”
“The first chance I got to wear one of [the designer] Valentino’s gowns—meaning my pocketbook and my body were ready—was in 1994. I’d never felt more beautiful. I loved the dress and me in the dress so much that I told my friend Gayle, ‘If I die in the near future, please have me buried in this.’…Valentino says your clothes should make you feel alive. They have to live with you and move with you. That’s the key to elegance: not just wearing beautiful things, but making what you’re wearing come alive.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say I was thin. I do, however, know better—the fact is, I’m not thin. But here’s my newfound reality: you don’t have to be thin to look great.”
“When [my children] left home, I fell into a huge, empty, black hole. Your children are grown and your career has slowed down—all the stuff that took up so much attention is gone, and you’re left with expansive time and space. You have to reimagine who are you and what life is all about. Photography was a blessing because it filled my time. If I had to start over, I’d pursue photography—probably to the exclusion of acting.”
“When I was at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, I began taking improv classes at a theater called Second City…I kept my job at the hospital and did shows at night. One night a patient named Rudy told me, ‘You should go out to California and audition for stuff.’ I said, ‘Oh, I’d never do that. I’d be humiliated. I’d fail.’ Rudy said, ‘I’m at the end of my life. I only have a few weeks to live, and my biggest regret is that I feared failure. Promise me that when I’m gone, you’ll go and fail many times in California.’ We shook hands on it.”
“I used to think that when you grew up, you actually stopped growing. How wrong I was.”
“I’ve been so focused on getting to the next level, I haven’t enjoyed the view from where I am. Years are a blur to me…because when you live a life in the fast lane, as I have, you end up speeding through, just moving to the next thing, doing more and more, and filling your schedule until there’s no time even to think about what you’re doing…With all that I know for sure, today I added this: It makes no difference how many peaks you reach if there was no pleasure in the climb.”
“We once went to a benefit where a band we wanted to hear was playing…I was shaking badly and people were coming up to me, hugging me and looking at me with that look I recognize. They’re looking for fear in me. When they don’t see that, they then see their own fear reflected back at them and they start to freak out…People look at me and think, My God, could that happen to me? And when I look back at them, it’s as if I’m saying, ‘It might, and maybe you’ll be okay. Just get there when you get there.’”
“I like to approach each subject with an open mind so I can listen and learn as much as possible and maybe even come away with an aha. I had a big one: The yearning to feel heard, needed, and important is so strong in all of us that we seek that validation in whatever form we can get it.”
“One day we broke into a recreation center stocked up with goodies…While we were in there eating as much as we could, I broke into an administrative room that had a piano in the corner. I almost closed the door, but something told me, Open that door, fool. And I did. I walked over and just put my finger over one piano key to see what sound it would make…Just like that, I heard music and felt a feeling I had never had in my life!…If I had closed that door, I might have had a whole ’nother life.”
“After many years of my weight going up and down—of saying on Monday ‘I’m going to do it’ and by Wednesday failing—I realized that the commitment to do well is a lifetime of choices that you make daily. The space to live in is not ‘I’ll try.’ Not ‘I want to.’ It’s ‘I have decided.’…The click came as an emotional and spiritual awakening.”
“I can’t inspire self-confidence in others if I personally haven’t achieved it.”
“I had to get clear—about who I was and why it was okay to say no. I had to make others aware of my new limits, to resist the feeling that I was selfish because I took care of myself first. I learned to trust that my friends would still be my friends if I couldn’t help them out financially. I learned that I would still be part of the family if I didn’t go home for Christmas and that my lovers would still respect me when I stood my ground.”
“A woman asked me, ‘What was the aha light bulb moment in your life?’ I realized it was when I figured out that my thoughts control my whole life—that no matter what hand life deals me, I can always choose my response to it…If you want your life to be more rewarding, you have to change the way you think.”
“[In Mexico], I was making money, I was an actress, and I was famous. It looked like what I wanted, but it was not…It’s what others would think that I’d want, and sometimes that makes you feel it’s good enough. But is it your dream? And it wasn’t my dream. And so I said that I’m going to leave it…I was excited about being brave about it and saying, ‘What I left didn’t grab me by the balls.’”
“If you make a choice that goes against what everyone else thinks, the world doesn’t fall apart.”
“Forget about kids: grown-ups say the darndest things. Sometimes they mean well, sometimes they mean to lacerate, sometimes they’re just clueless. The challenge (at least for me) is not to take any of it personally…even when it’s meant personally. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me, unless of course I decide to let them.”
“I no longer scramble blindly through hardship. I no longer emerge from a bad time feeling relieved just to have survived. Instead of despairing, I try to find the lesson within the experience.”
“I was going through a divorce and my personal life was a mess…My friend Duke Ellington, who happened to be in town for a concert, had heard I was alone…I opened the door to find one of the greatest surprises of my life: there was a choir singing ‘On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.’…For years this kindness from Duke lifted up my whole life. It showed me that no matter how bad things seem, there are always people in this world who care about others. That revelation changed my life.”
“Instead of waking up New Year’s morning and saying, ‘I’m going to do X now,’ then berating yourself a month later when that resolution didn’t work, remember: You’re doing nothing less than rewiring your brain. Approach change as if you’re learning a new language or new instrument. Obviously, you’re not going to be fluent or play symphonies instantly; you’ll need constant focus and practice.”
“When we find ourselves waiting, whether through force of circumstance or lingering habit, we should listen deeply…We can learn to pervade the terrain of waiting with our awareness to make it vital, connected, and fully alive.”
“If you’re trying in vain to quit something you do compulsively, like overspending or smoking or macramé, try quitting the effort to quit.”
“You won’t be powerful in life until you are powerful over your money—how you feel about it, and how you treat it.”
“Lying and cheating are sins. A hot fudge sundae is not.”
“I’ve always wanted to be able to see where my life would take me, and now I understand that I can, because I know there is a direct connection between what I say and what happens to me.”
“MORE THAN A DECADE AGO, MY STAFF AND I BOOKED A HUSBAND CAUGHT IN AN ADULTEROUS SEX SCANDAL, AND RIGHT THERE ON OUR STAGE BEFORE MILLIONS OF VIEWERS, THE WIFE HEARD THAT HER PARTINER HAD BEEN UNFAITHFUL. IT’S A MOMENT I HAVE NEVER FORGOTTEN: THE HUMILIATION AND DESPAIR ON THAT WOMAN’S FACE MADE ME ASHAMED FOR PUTTING HER IN THAT POSITION. RIGHT THEN, I DECIDED I’D NEVER AGAIN BE PART OF A SHOW THAT DEMEANS, EMBARRASSES, OR DIMINISHES ANOTHER HUMAN BEING…ONCE THE LIGHT BULB CAME ON FOR ME THAT DAY, MY CALLING BECAME TO CREATE SHOWS THAT ENCOURAGE AND INSPIRE AS MUCH AS THEY ENTERTAIN–TELEVISION THAT LEAVES GUESTS WITH THEIR DIGNITY AND HELPS US ALL SEE OUR LIVES IN A DIFFERENT WAY.”
–OPRAH