What material success does is provide you with the ability to concentrate on other things that really matter. And that is being able to make a difference, not only in your own life, but in other people's lives.

The goal of my shows, my interviews, my business, my philanthropy, all of it, whatever ventures I might pursue, would be to make clear that what unites us is ultimately far more redeeming and compelling than anything that separates me.

The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.

Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another steppingstone to greatness.

Being human means you will make mistakes. And you will make mistakes, because failure is God's way of moving you in another direction.

I don't believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process.

Every stumble is not a fall, and every fall does not mean failure.

If you're constantly pushing yourself higher, higher, the law of averages - not to mention the myth of Icarus - predicts that you will at some point fall. And when you do, I want you to know this, remember this: There is no such thing as failure.

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.

Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. Do better the second time. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. This is your moment. Own it.

I believe that every single event in life happens in an opportunity to choose love over fear.

The thing you fear most has no power. Your fear of it is what has the power. Facing the truth really will set you free.

I am a woman in process. I'm just trying like everybody else. I try to take every conflict, every experience, and learn from it. Life is never dull.

The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.

The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.

When I look into the future, it's so bright it burns my eyes.

What God intended for you goes far beyond anything you can imagine.

My idea of heaven is a great big baked potato and someone to share it with.

Your job is not just to do what your parents say, what your teachers say, what society says, but to figure out what your heart calling is and to be led by that.

With age comes the understanding and appreciation of your most important asset, your health.

Where there is no struggle, there is no strength.

I think people who have good parents come into the world with a strength, yes, and an advantage.

Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you will never, ever have enough.

Follow your instincts. That's where true wisdom manifests itself.

Turn your wounds into wisdom.

I know that inner wisdom is more precious than wealth. The more you spend it, the more you gain.

Whatever has happened to you in your past has no power over this present moment, because life is now.

It's much easier for me to make major life, multi-million dollar decisions, than it is to decide on a carpet for my front porch. That's the truth.

You alone are enough.

Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.

I have a lot of things to prove to myself. One is that I can live my life fearlessly.

I remember a specific moment, watching my grandmother hang the clothes on the line, and her saying to me, 'you are going to have to learn to do this,' and me being in that space of awareness and knowing that my life would not be the same as my grandmother's life.

Acting is about going into the space, and there are just some places that I'm not willing to go.

A healthy friendship is one where you share your true feelings without fearing the end of the relationship. It's also one where you sometimes have to let things that bug you slide. The tough moments will make you wiser about yourself and each other. They will also make you stronger and closer as friends.

There are no shortcuts to genuine friendship. Relationships are built over time.

There are times in every friendship when you or your friend are too busy to call or are more focused on other relationships. It will hurt, but it's rarely personal. Making it personal usually makes things worse, and being too clingy or demanding can drive a friend even further away. Like people, friendships can get 'overworked' and need to rest.

When girls can be honest with each other, they can make mistakes on their own terms and discover through experience - and not through knee-jerk adult intervention - what a healthy friendship should look like.

If the Internet has been called a great democratizer, perhaps what social media has done is let anyone enter the beauty pageant. Teens can cover up pimples, whiten teeth, and even airbrush with the swipe of a finger, curating their own image to become prettier, thinner, and hotter.

Many of us endure pain in the service of beauty every single day. We rip off our hair with hot wax, jam our soft skin into modern-day corsets, and burn our scalps with dyes.

We have to teach girls communication skills.

I realized that I wanted a Rhodes Scholarship, not because I wanted to go to graduate school but because I wanted to win a famous award. Quitting forced me to realize I was on the wrong track and that I had lost touch with who I was and what I cared about.

I run skills-building programs focused on healthy risk taking, failure resilience, and self-care for undergraduates around the country.

The meteoric rise of the 'wellness' industry online has launched an entire industry of fitness celebrities on social media. Millions of followers embrace their regimens for diet and exercise, but increasingly, the drive for 'wellness' and 'clean eating' has become stealthy cover for more dieting and deprivation.

Failing well is a skill. Letting girls do it gives them critical practice coping with a negative experience. It also gives them the opportunity to develop a kind of confidence and resilience that can only be forged in times of challenge.

Happiness doesn't just happen. It must be pursued. And if the pursuit of the 'ultimate currency' of happiness helps us choose occupations that confer present and future benefit, and these choices, in turn, motivate us to succeed, this strikes me as perhaps the most powerful non-cognitive skill of all.

For the self-conscious or insecure girl, technology can become a crippling addiction, an insatiable hunger not just for connection but the elusive promise of being liked by everyone.

In the so-called age of girl power, we have failed to cut loose our most regressive standards of female success - like pleasing others and looking sexy - and to replace them with something more progressive - like valuing intelligence and hard work.

I was a single mom by choice at 37, and if my love life hadn't quite panned out, most everything else had. I was a classic 'amazing girl' - driven, social, and relentlessly well-rounded - reveling in the fruits of post-Title IX America: an all-metro athlete in high school, Rhodes Scholar at 24, best-selling author by 27.

Social media forces girls to bear witness to painful realities of relationship that were previously hidden from view. It is a new kind of TMI, or 'too much information': publicly posted photographs of an outing or party you did not attend, or a personal web page like Formspring, can send a girl into paroxysms of anxiety and grief.

It never hurts to tell your teen they matter more than their looks.