Every single day, I wake up and take a glimpse of where I am now compared to where I was before, and the work that we have all put in to be in this space. I think of that, and being able to express myself through my art and show up and be present - that's activism, advocacy, and artistry in itself.

Dictators cause the world's worst problems: all the collapsed states, and all the devastated economies. All the vapid cases of corruption, grand theft, and naked plunder of the treasury are caused by dictators, leaving in their wake trails of wanton destruction, horrendous carnage and human debris.

Virtually everywhere in the world, people still wake up and want their country to be more like the United States than any other nation. We are the envy of the world because of what we stand for and how our democratic process, flawed as it may often seem to be, operates. We should take pride in that.

A lot of people, for example, live an anxious life. They don't realize they have a super-high level of anxiety. So we're gonna work on really writing down how anxious you feel at the moment you wake up. There's nothing wrong with it; the point is you learn to evaluate yourself and regulate yourself.

In her second career as a minister, my mother defied a legacy of chauvinism to become a leader of our community, overseeing a church that served as a hub, offering parenting classes, a food pantry, after-school programming, and - in the wake of Hurricane Katrina - a lifeline to those ravaged by loss.

I'm usually woken by a vibration on my up-band. It's the gradual vibration for about ten seconds, and then the chimes of my blue light. It's just a way to wake gently. It all gently puts me into awake-mode. I play music off of my Sonos playlist. 'The Rachmaninoff Concerto 3 in D-minor', 1st movement.

The first thing I do every day when I wake up is thank God for letting me make it through the night and giving me another day of life - just because sometimes I wake up, and I cannot believe I'm doing what I'm doing. I just thank Him. I don't know how I deserve it, but it's completely because of Him.

I love to work. I know that sounds ridiculous to say because all people love to work, but I love the homework that goes into acting. I love figuring out different ways of playing a scene. I love the energy of being on set. I love not getting enough sleep because I have to wake up early in the morning.

When they told me I had cancer - a very rare form called appendiceal cancer - I was shocked. But I went straight into battle mode. Every morning, I'd wake up and have an internal conversation with cancer. 'All right, dude,' I'd tell it, 'go ahead and hit me. But I'm going to hit you back even harder.'

There's a time in your life where you're not quite sure where you are. You think everything's perfect, but it's not perfect... Then one day you wake up and you can't quite picture yourself in the situation you're in. But the secret is, if you can picture yourself doing anything in life, you can do it.

Everyone should wake up and have a fresh-squeezed orange every day. By having a fresh glass of orange juice with American oranges, you are supporting the local economy, you have all the vitamin C you need in a day, and you support the environment because you don't use any plastic from bottles or bags.

Television, radio, social media. The 24/7 news cycle plows forward mercilessly on our desks, in our cars and in our pockets. Thousands and thousands of messages and voices bombard us from the moment we wake, fighting for our attention. All we see and hear, all day long, is news. And most of it is bad.

What do I mean when I say 'suspended animation'? It is the process by which animals de-animate, appear dead and then can wake up again without being harmed. OK, so here is the sort of big idea: If you look out at nature, you find that as you tend to see suspended animation, you tend to see immortality.

The advent of Google+ and the emergence of the personalized web means this is more true than ever. Brands, and their advertising partners, must wake up to this challenge and define themselves with clarity, consistency and authenticity. Otherwise they just might find themselves shouting in a ghost town.

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.

I think if I heard someone else talking about their life, describing all the problems I've had, they'd look like they were through. Done. But there's something about me - I'm smiling. Those things are really not bad enough to put me in a slump. I'm smiling with the opportunity to wake up every morning.

Changing the DNA of a large, multilateral organization such as the United Nations to deal effectively with modern threats is not easy. Indeed, when the United Nations was created in the wake of World War II, threats came almost exclusively from one state carrying out acts of aggression against another.

I feel like I'm in a weird state, and I wake up in Hollywood, and I've got a couple of studio movies underneath my belt, and I take these meetings with people. Sometimes it's this great, weird sense of oddness that comes at you, because I've never really stopped thinking the way that I started thinking.

I feel like hair is the number one thing that makes me feel beautiful or not. If I have really bad hair, but my makeup's beautiful and I have a wonderful dress on, I'm still not happy. So if I wake up, and I've got 2 big zits on my face and my hair looks fierce, I feel ok. I have a weird hair obsession.

We think of the Marine Corps as a military outfit, and of course it is, but for me, the U.S. Marine Corps was a four-year crash course in character education. It taught me how to make a bed, how to do laundry, how to wake up early, how to manage my finances. These are things my community didn't teach me.

You don't just wake up one day with dementia or Alzheimer's; these conditions are developmental. Even when a problem triggers the need to collect data, it's reviewed by a specialist and filed away. There's no central repository allowing information to be shared across a multitude of researchers worldwide.

I wake up every morning and I feel like I'm juggling glass balls. I live in Los Angeles, my business is run out of London, and most evenings I'm cuddled up in front of Skype, in my dressing gown, speaking with my studio in London. I travel a lot, my team travel a lot, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

I think of being an actor as kind of a young man's gig. It's emasculating, in a way, people messing with you and putting make-up on you and telling you when to wake up and when to go to sleep, holding your hand to cross the street. I can do it up to a certain point, and then I start to feel like a puppet.

My mom is proud of me. But she might not be too happy about the hours I keep or how little I eat. I wake up so late that it would be inappropriate to have breakfast. At most, I will have a snack in the day and dinner. I realize that it's not the healthiest way to live, but it's all I really have time for.

The greatest are an inspiration for all the kids who wake up early in the morning. Everyone watches you, is inspired by you and wants to be you. So you influence society. That's what being more than an athlete means. I want more kids to have that opportunity. I want everybody to start with the same chance.

I wake up and play a different person every day. Playing all these different characters and trying to figure out who your true authentic self is at the core of that as you're playing all these different roles, and man, that self-awareness starts to come into effect. And you start to see who you really are.

When a lot of people wake up in the morning and put on their underwear, the first thing they feel that day is terrible about themselves. When you see that your body is not what other people want, it can be really devastating. I have so many friends that I grew up with who have had serious eating disorders.

My true inspiration is to give everything to my kids that I never had. I had a really rough upbringing, and I want to break that chain. I've broken the chain, and I want to give my kids happiness every single day. When they wake up and hop on me and say; 'Dad I love you,' that is what means the most to me.

We have to choose every day to be active participants. To wake up in the morning and choose this life and make something of it is an incredible thing. Not many living creatures have that option. We have so many opportunities and options - it's a huge burden, but it's also the most freeing part of our lives.

When I'm doing a book tour in the States, I'll wake up in the room sometimes in an anonymous chain hotel, and I don't know where I am right away. I'll go to the window, and it doesn't help there either, especially if you're in an anonymous strip and it's the usual Victoria's Secret, Gap, Chili's, Applebee's.

Most songs have meager beginnings. You wake up in the morning, you throw on your suspenders, and you subvocalize and just think. They seem to form like calcium. I can't think of a story right off the bat that was that interesting. I write things on the back of my hand, usually, and sing into a tape recorder.

Just getting from the airport straight to the gym is gonna be your best bet to knock off that rust and wake yourself up and get that blood flowing. You sit in a car or a plane cramped up, you lose a lot of blood flow and get that swelling in your legs. There are all kinds of dangers in sitting still too long.

I find motion, literally, is where ideas come from. It's almost like a built-in rhythm section. The contents of the songs are about change, and a lot of that stuff happens when you're on tour, and you wake up and you're in a different place and you start thinking about where you're going and where you've been.

Mom still has a huge, beautifully decorated Christmas tree. The whole family comes together after midnight mass and has the traditional plum cake and wine. We spend the night at mom's home, and in the morning we wake up and open the presents. In the afternoon, we sit down to have a traditional Christmas lunch.

What I am very, very moved and struck by is that so many people in the world are often living a life that they hadn't planned for themselves. And they wake up one day and say, 'Hang on. Who am I? Is this really me? Is this what I really wanted?' And also, 'Can I change it? Have I got the courage to change it?'

You can be shattered, and then you can put yourself back together piece by piece. But what can happen over time is this: You wake up one day and realize that you have put yourself back together completely differently. That you are whole, finally, and strong - but you are now a different shape, a different size.

I think in the wake of 9/11, like a lot of Americans, you know, we were all very traumatized by the attacks, traumatized in a totally different way by some of what happened afterward in response. And I think there have been these questions hovering in the past decade of, what kind of country are we? Who are we?

In the summer of 2009, in the wake of a crisis in her life, my mother moved from San Diego to San Francisco to live with my 16-year-old daughter and me. My mother was 77. I was 51. Despite a chorus of skepticism from friends - who knew about my upbringing - I was determined to do what I could to help my mother.

I like to wake up late, around 11 A.M., especially if I have been out the night before. Then I go to brunch with either my friends or my girlfriend. I then like to just chill out: read the papers, read some scripts and then take it very easy. If it's sunny, I go for a walk with my dog, Niles, in the countryside.

The press don't wake up in the morning simply to be a mouthpiece for pols - they're out to uncover and expose news. That often is at odds with what politicians are setting out to do - it's both symbiotic and antagonistic. They need each other, they work in concert with one another, they work against one another.

Keep yourself motivated. You've got to be motivated, you've got to wake up every day and understand what that day is about; you've got to have personal goals - short term goals, intermediate goals, and long term goals. Be flexible in getting to those goals, but if you do not have goals, you will not achieve them.

I don't think you should ever say, 'This is the last time'. Music isn't like that. You'll be sitting there not wishing to get onto a stage again for maybe two, three, four, five months, or maybe a year, then suddenly you'll wake up and feel like you've got to do it again. It's in the blood, and I never say never.

My first trimester I was so exhausted. I could sleep 10 hours, then wake up, look in the mirror and still have eyes like a hound dog! I felt like the life was sucked out of me, no matter how much sleep I got. It was obvious that my body was really busy doing something else and 'beauty sleep' didn't exist anymore!

When I wake up, I expect things to be good. If they're not, then I try to set about trying to make them as good as I can 'cause I know I'm gonna have to live that day anyway. So why not try to make the most of it if you can? Some days, they pan out a little better than others, but you still gotta always just try.

It's hard to describe what it's like to live with a concussion. You want to enjoy things like you used to, but you can't. You wake up in the morning and wonder how you're going to feel that day: What will my reactions be like? Will I have a headache? Will I have to triple check to see if I unplugged the flat iron?

We have to program the mind of the public that age is not ugly. Age is just age. Wake up, American children, and stop listening to other people's voices. Know yourself, be true to yourself and make a contribution. It took me half my life to know myself. I listened to other people's opinions and took them as gospel.

I would wake up really early and go into the hotel bathroom, put a towel over the toilet, and put my laptop there. I'd put my headphones on and just write. And so now when I do writing sessions, and I am stuck on a part, or I can't figure out a chorus, I'm just like, 'Give me a second,' and I'll go to that bathroom.

I do what I love to do at the moment. If I wake up tomorrow and decide I want to dance, that's what I'd do. Or design clothes. I think I'd throw myself into whatever I'm doing now. It's not about abandoning what I was doing before, or giving up. It's about knowing that if I die tomorrow, I lived the way I wanted to.

That nice, soft pillow and the warm blanket, and it's all comfortable, and no one wants to leave that comfort - but if you can wake up early in the morning, get a head start on everyone else that's still sleeping, get productive time doing things that you need to do - that's a huge piece to moving your life forward.

I live with myself. I wake up with myself, I eat, and I take a dump with myself. I don't see anything special there. I do all the same things other human beings and creatures do. I don't see any need to be telling the data of the day of this particular human being by posting it on online. It's not interesting to me.

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