A Quote by Raphael Bob-Waksberg

I think as soon as we start thinking of ourselves as good people, that's when we start letting ourselves off the hook which is bad. I think we should always be trying to be better but that doesn't mean we want to be good.
I think we are here to challenge ourselves and make ourselves better people and not just sit around in the world simply floating through life. You should be trying to do something great and making yourself better. You should be trying to evolve. That's what I'm trying to do, and that is very important to me.
We should start off with the premise that people that we're disagreeing with are like ourselves. Try and work out why they think what they think.
I think that, as African-Americans, oftentimes we have to put ourselves on pedestals as opposed to really looking at ourselves and trying to understand ourselves and become better people. We always have to be on pedestals.
But what we're really trapped by is perceptions. You think you need to lose weight for someone to love you. I think if I gain weight, no one will love me. What we really need is to just stop thinking of ourselves as bodies and start thinking of ourselves as people.
We are all the time, from our childhood, trying to lay the blame upon something outside ourselves. We are always standing up to set right other people, and not ourselves. If we are miserable, we say, "Oh, the world is a devil's world." We curse others and say, "What infatuated fools!" But why should we be in such a world, if we really are so good? If this is a devil's world, we must be devils also; why else should we be here? "Oh, the people of the world are so selfish!" True enough; but why should we be found in that company, if we be better? Just think of that.
The greatest human virtue bears no proportion to human vanity. We always think ourselves better than we are, and are generally desirous that others should think us still better than we think ourselves. To praise us for actions or dispositions which deserve praise is not to confer a benefit, but to pay a tribute. We have always pretensions to fame which, in our own hearts, we know to be disputable, and which we are desirous to strengthen by a new suffrage; we have always hopes which we suspect to be fallacious, and of which we eagerly snatch at every confirmation.
But how can we love someone if we don't like him? Easy-we do it to ourselves all the time. We don't always have tender, comfortable feelings about ourselves; sometimes we feel foolish, stupid, asinine, or wicked. But we always love ourselves: we always seek our own good. Indeed, we feel dislike toward ourselves, we berate ourselves, precisely because we love ourselves; because we care about our good, we are impatient with our bad.
We're always trying to outdo ourselves, trying to do better, trying to write better songs. I think we want to inspire other people as well, so that's what we'll try to do through future songs.
Forgive everybody for everything. Just forgive and start - most of us can't start with ourselves. We have to forgive the people we think did things to us. So that's fine. Start there - wherever. Start with the dog who peed on the rug. I don't care where you start, just do it.
You don't want to make performances; you want to make people. When a project knows, 'Okay, my bad guys need to be a little sympathetic, and my good guys need to have a bit of a mean streak,' you're off to a good start.
Some people say, "Sometimes I have violent thoughts, what can I do?" So I say, "Well, have them!" Cos we should not try to control ourselves. It's very bad to control ourselves in this sense. If you have any emotion at all, if its a bad emotion or good emotion, think about it, you should just understand that you have those emotions. And it's good because we are people and we have all these emotions. And the result of that is you would become more and more peaceful. If you don't let those emotions be inside of you then you become extremely violent.
So let God know what you're doing just by doing it - or feel good about yourself. But don't rely on men and women to inspire you to do good - because we will probably often fail you with our own imperfections! We all should be trying to improve ourselves, regardless of how much better off or worse off we are than the person next to us, because we can all get better.
Every book has to start with a first chapter, and I think that 'Middle of Nowhere,' 'Mmmbop' and 'Where Is the Love' are good places to start for us. I don't think it's a bad place.
We find ourselves in that situation where we want to believe, we want to think we're the exception, we want to think we can change someone or tame a lion or make a bad guy good or something like that but 9 times out of 10 we end up looking back going, "Oh, shame on me, should've seen that one coming!"
I don't want to take fame for granted because that is when you start to think you are better than everyone else. That is when you start thinking that you are someone that you are not.
I did a lot of research on villains, and guys who start behaving nefariously didn't start out as bad people. My research indicates that all of these people were scorned and hurt by love. Darth Vader didn't start off as a bad guy. He was a good guy. Only when Natalie Portman betrayed him, did he go to the dark side.
This site uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. More info...
Got it!