30 Kanye West Quotes To Live By

not smiling makes me smile

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Without any further ado:

1. You may be talented, but you’re not Kanye West.

2. But behind bravery and courage is the ability to brace for pain, not the idea of never having pain or trying to avoid pain. Bravery and courage is walking into pain and knowing that something better is on the other side.

3. I am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.

4. I will go down as the voice of this generation, of this decade, I will be the loudest voice.

5. I’ll say things that are serious and put them in a joke form so people can enjoy them. We laugh to keep from crying.

6. I hate when I’m on a flight and I wake up with a water bottle next to me like oh great now I gotta be responsible for this water bottle.

7. I feel like I’m too busy writing history to read it.

8. I try to get as close to a childlike level as possible because we were all artists back then. So you just close your eyes and think back to when you were as young as you can remember and had the least barriers to your creativity.

9. Time is the only luxury. It’s the only thing you can’t get back.

10. I want people to remember me the way they know Nike. That level of impact.

11. I care about innovating. I don’t care about capitalizing off of something that we’ve seen or heard a thousand times. I’m not a capitalist in that way. I’m an innovator. That’s my job. I like two things: I like innovating and I like making things better. It’s not that I always have to invent things that are new. Sometimes I can take something that’s there and attempt to make a better version and that’s what gets me off.

12. Our focus needs to be less on what our legacy’s going to be or how we can control each other and more how we can give to each other.

13. I rock a bespoke suit and I go to Harold’s for fried chicken.

14. I also love people being inspired to follow their dreams, because I think people are oppressed by smoke and mirrors, by perception.

15. I think that people don’t make the most of their lives.

16. When I think beauty, I think of an untouched forest, only created by God’s hand. I think of a gray sky that separates the architecture from the background and creates these amazing photographs because you don’t have to block the sun above you when you’re taking the photograph. I think beauty is important and it’s undermined by our current corporate culture. When you think about the corporate office, you don’t see the importance of beauty. I think all colors are beautiful and in a corporate world only one color is.

17. I want to steer clear of “opportunities” and focus on dreams.

18. A lot of people are very sacred with their ideas, and there is something to protecting yourself in that way, but there’s also something to idea sharing, or being the person who makes the mistake in public so people can study that.

19. I’ll crash the motherfucking internet when I feel like it!

20. Society has put up so many boundaries, so many limitations on what’s right and wrong that it’s almost impossible to get a pure thought out. It’s like a little kid, a little boy, looking at colors, and no one told him what colors are good, before somebody tells you you shouldn’t like pink because that’s for girls, or you’d instantly become a gay two-year-old. Why would anyone pick blue over pink? Pink is obviously a better color. Everyone’s born confident, and everything’s taken away from you.

21. (My instinct has) only led me to complete awesomeness at all times. It’s only led me to awesome truth and awesomeness. Beauty, truth, awesomeness. That’s all it is.

22. You see a black family, it says they’re looting. If you see a white family, it says they’re looking for food.

23. All these walls that keep us from loving each other as one family or one race–racism, religion, where we grew up, whatever, class, socioeconomic–what makes us be so selfish and prideful, what keeps us from wanting to help the next man, what makes us be so focused on a personal legacy as opposed to the entire legacy of a race, The dinosaurs aren’t remembered for much more than their bones. When humanity’s gone, what do we give to this little planet that we’re on, and what could we do collectively, removing the pride?

24. I just zoned on how ill it is to really fall in love… Pimpin’ is whatev… Love is that shit!

25. I think it takes experience to be a great poet and communicator, and as life goes on I have more and more experiences, so hopefully I’ll just get better and better.

26. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life.

27. There’s a reason why the universe plans for certain things to happen the way they are, and the only thing that you can be responsible for is your art.

28. All we have are our dreams, and you can step on our dreams and ideas all you want, but we won’t stop fighting

29. My goal, if I was going to do art, fine art, would have been to become Picasso or greater. That always sounds so funny to people, comparing yourself to someone in the past that has done so much, and in your life you’re not even allowed to think that you can do as much. That’s a mentality that suppresses humanity.

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