Quotes

Failure is a great teacher, and I think when you make mistakes and you recover from them and you treat them as valuable learning experiences, then you've got something to share.

A guy that's really serious about you, he's gotta be talking to you, he's gotta want to have one-on-one, in-your-face interaction. That's how we are.

I'd have to say I'm most proud of my mentoring camp that I do in Dallas every year for one hundred boys from single-parent homes. I was raised by a mother who was a Sunday school teacher and a father who worked hard. Together they taught me to give back.

I'm not a doctor. I just have a tremendous amount of common sense.

A person has to remember that the road to success is always under construction. You have to get that through your head. That it is not easy becoming successful.

You have nothing if you're texting a guy in a relationship. We can text six women a minute. We can text it and push 'reply all.' I mean, since we're lying, we might as well lie to everybody.

If a man loves you . . . he's willing to profess it. He'll give you a title after a while. You're going to be his lady, his woman, his fiancée, his wife, his baby's mama, something.

One of the biggest misconceptions that a woman has is that a man has to accept her the way she is. No, we don't. I don't know who told you that. We like the bright and shiny. If you stop wearing the makeup, stop putting on nail polish, stop wearing high heels, you'll lose us.

All I knew growing up was that my father was married to and loved my momma, period. He worked hard, made some money, and put it on the dresser. She spent it on the family, and he went out and earned some more. He taught me the most about love.

God lets you be successful because he trusts you that you will do the right thing with it. Now, does he get disappointed often? All the time, because people get there and they forget how they got it.

Men don't come up to you to just talk. We come up to you with a plan. We're looking across the room at you, and we don't care about your hopes and dreams. We don't care about what your future holds. We saw something we wanted.

I tell my boys not to play rough with their younger sister. I try to teach them what I know already: You're never going to win an argument with a girl, so just let her have what she wants!

My father instilled in me to take care of my family. Show up even when you don't want to show up.

Being on a comedy tour is like traveling with family, everyone is all having a great time... then all of a sudden it turns sour. One thing gets said out of turn, and everyone is on everyone's last nerve. After an hour of silence, we all start laughing about it.

I just believe if you don't believe in God, then where is your moral barometer? That's just me talking. You can believe what you want to believe.

You've got to be in a bad relationship to really understand what a great one is.

I'm just a living witness that you can be an imperfect soldier and still be in the army fighting for God Almighty. Don't you think you got to be perfect 'cause I ain't.

Women are the real reason we get up every day. I'm talking about real men. If there were no women, I would not even have to bathe, because why would I care? These are guys I'm hanging with. I wake up for a woman every day of my life to make it happen for her.

You can be happy, or you can be right. If you want to be part of a couple and win every argument, you're in trouble.

I have seen some crazy people do some crazy things on my variety show. I have to stop and ask them a lot of the time, just how they figured out that they could do the things that they do, some of it is just plain freaky.

The first time I saw my wife, Marjorie, I was doing stand-up in Memphis, and she was sitting in the front row. Afterward, I walked up and said, "Ma'am, I'm going to marry you one day". And 15 years later, I did.

You've got to quit lowering your standards. Set your requirements up front so when a guy hooks you, he has to know this is business.

My mother raised me in the church. I was not allowed to stay home on Sunday; there was no option. I sang in the choir all the way up until I went to college.

I'm not a relationship expert. I'm an expert on manhood.

You can take lessons to become almost anything: flying lessons, piano lessons, skydiving lessons, acting lessons, race car driving lessons, singing lessons. But there's no class for comedy. You have to be born with it. God has to give you this gift.

How can smart women be so stupid about men sometimes? Lack of knowledge. It's what men have kept secret for so long.

The problem is, women have stopped setting the bar high.

I'm not really a relationship expert but . . . I'm an expert on manhood and what men think.

I think there are so many books out there written on relationships and romance that women are the authors of. How can women know exactly how men think? And there are so many guys out there with relationship books who are just not telling the truth. They have shaded parts.

I don't think it's cool for people to say, 'You shouldn't reference God because I don't believe that, and I don't want to hear it.' Well, there's a lot of stuff I don't believe that I still gotta hear.

Comedians walk out, get a feel for the crowd. If it's not going good, we change directions. If we got to drag your momma into this thing, we will. Whatever we got to do.

God has positioned me just this way to be just like I am, to say what I say how I say it.

My mother was a Sunday school teacher. So I am a byproduct of prayer. My mom just kept on praying for her son.

I never say "nagging". I think that "nagging" is a term that men created to get women to pipe down some. But it's a trap that we've created. We created several terms for women to back you down. Nagging means to stop asking me questions, then we get away with more. I think it's a term men created.

Hollywood is run by people who sit up in their executive office, who are not connected to Mississippi, Alabama, Chicago, South Carolina. They know nothing about that, they don't go to church, and they make their decisions about what they think is right.

There has been nothing more impactful on my life and meaningful to me than the introduction of Christ. That, hands down, blows away every joke I've ever written.

The Lord saved my soul.

God has given me a life far beyond anything I ever dreamed about. God is, man, God is something else man.

The best timed joke or the best timed phrase comes at spontaneous moments and just relies on me as the host to be very quick, and that's what I do.

I don't want to be 60 years old standing on stage telling some jokes. I want my life to mean something.

I don't have The Jerry Springer Show (1991). I just got Family Feud (1999), but some of them families, when they lose, man, they have some real conversations with each other back behind that wall, but I've never been involved in any of them.

I'm a comedian first. I've learned how to act. I just draw on life experiences and that's how I've learned. I didn't take classes or anything. I don't need no classroom.

I don't want people to see me fall. I mean, I got enough people cheering for me to fall now... The Internet has created some amazing place for evil to exist, you dig?

If you'd asked me then if I saw how big "The Steve Harvey Morning Show" was going to be, I couldn't tell you. But I knew I could reach people not as a character but as Steve Harvey, because although I tell jokes for a living, I've also lived, and I think I can relate to you more than you know.

I tell people I'm a stand-up comedian two hours a week. The rest of the time, I'm somebody's husband, I'm somebody's father. I'm a man. I take great pride in that.

Every day, President [Barack Obama] sends a beautiful message about how we should treat our women based on how he treats his wife. When people went after his wife during the campaign, he took a stand.

We all think that this relationship thing is a game out here. All I'm saying to women is, "Okay. If it's a game, here are the rules that we play by".

Other than my foundation - mentoring programs - everything I do is for money.

I don't have much of an attention span for TV--I nod off during the basketball playoffs--but when I watch Game of Thrones (2011) On Demand, I'm glued to the set. It's mystical and addictive. Tyrion Lannister, that's my man.

People see me laughing and telling jokes, but they had no idea after the show was over, I had no joy in my life, in my heart.