Miriam Makeba Quotes

Real artists ship.

To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.

African music, though very old, is always being rediscovered in the West.

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

I don't really need to stand out, there's room for everyone. Although I haven't built a niche yet, I'm just writing love songs.

I look at an ant and see myself: a native South African, endowed with a strength much greater than my size, so I might cope with the weight of racism that crushes my spirit.

The opposite of work is idleness. But very few of us know what to do with idleness. When you look at the way that we distribute our lives in general, you realize that in the periods in which we have a lot of money, we have very little time. And then when we finally have time, we have neither the money nor the health.

I shall never be able to have any more of these boyish, zestful affairs — which are, really, when one thinks about it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation. People are too various to be treated so lightly.

What was the future? The future was a solid wall, not promising, not threatening—all bunk. No guarantees of anything, not even the guarantee that life isn't one big joke.

Oh, I really wish people just thronged around to see your first film. Just a sec. Wanna know... ...Original story, or pirated?

I had a very pleasant evening, however, though you will probably find out that there was no particular reason for it; but I do not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until there is some real opportunity for it.

I'm not a princess,
This ain't a fairytale.
I'm not the one you'll sweep off her feet,
Lead her up the stairwell.
This ain't Hollywood,
This is a small town.
I was a dreamer before
You went and let me down.
Now it's too late for you and your white horse
To come around.

If Shakespeare required a word and had not met it in civilized discourse, he unhesitatingly made it up.

There was no real progress,” she acknowledged in Pulse!. “I wasn’t making any money out of it, so I just stopped

I trapped my breath in the bellows of my throat, and a lamp blazed up inside, showing me who I really was. I crossed the darkness holding fast to that lamp.

One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.