For me, the opposite of scarcity is not abundance. It’s enough. I’m enough. My kids are enough.

I don’t keep people around me that aren’t family. You don’t get to stay. Unless you’re eating at the table with us, you’re not part. We eat together, we cry together, we live together, we die together. Everything that we do is for each other, and we care for another.

God wants to bless us where we are.

I don’t pity any man who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who does not work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.

I remember my mother’s prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.

My family, frankly, they weren’t folks who went to church every week. My mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew but she didn’t raise me in the church, so I came to my Christian faith later in life and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want to lead.

Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.

Material things are delightful, but they’re not important.

Americans are far more remarkable than we give ourselves credit for. We’ve been so busy damning ourselves for years. We’ve done it all, and yet we don’t take credit for it.

We will always be a family. Always.

We are not the sum of our possessions.

I don’t have a problem with ageing – in fact, I embrace that aspect of it. And am able to and obviously am going to be able to quite easily… it doesn’t faze me at all.

He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else – means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

My first job in all honesty is going to continue to be mom-in-chief. Making sure that in this transition, which will be even more of a transition for the girls… that they are settled and that they know they will continue to be the center of our universe.

This is a moment that I deeply wish my parents could have lived to share. My father would have enjoyed what you have so generously said of me-and my mother would have believed it.

Don’t feel sorry for me.

The answer I found is you stay away from the people who make fun of you, and you join these ad hoc groups who understand your craziness.

We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty.

Be happy with being you. Love your flaws. Own your quirks. And know that you are just as perfect as anyone else, exactly as you are.

I want kids. I want a soccer team, and I want a husband.

I want to negotiate what I’m worth. I want to put my analytics forward, man-to-man, and to be like, ‚This is what I’m owed now. Pay me.‘ And then we can talk.

My son has died of AIDS.

I am easily satisfied with the very best.

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

This happiness consisted of nothing else but the harmony of the few things around me with my own existence, a feeling of contentment and well-being that needed no changes and no intensification.

The greatest legacy one can pass on to one’s children and grandchildren is not money or other material things accumulated in one’s life, but rather a legacy of character and faith.

It would have been difficult to have an ugly daughter.

My mother was a full-time mother. She didn’t have much of her own career, her own life, her own experiences… everything was for her children. I will never be as good a mother as she was. She was just grace incarnate. She was the most generous, loving – she’s better than me.

The only thing I have to go by is what my mother and father told me, how I was brought up.

I am good, but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love.

Upon the farm of the uncle with whom I lived, we did know of the mortgage as some dreadful damper on youthful hopes of things that could not be bought. I do have a vivid recollection that the major purpose of a farm was to produce a living right on the spot for the family.

I’m crazy and I don’t pretend to be anything else.

The man never feels the want of what it never occurs to him to ask for.

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.

The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

My mami and papi love my music. They’re always listening to the radio waiting for one of my songs to come on. And when it does, they turn up the volume – and turn it back down when it’s over.

I did stand-up for my grandparents every day when I was, like, eight.

The kindness that’s been shown to me, by doctors as well as my family and my friends, it’s really saved my life.

The purpose of our lives is to be happy.

The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.

Marriage and family are ordained of God. The family is the most important social unit in time and in eternity. Under God’s great plan of happiness, families can be sealed in temples and be prepared to return to dwell in His holy presence forever. That is eternal life!

I’m just glad I was able to return to some of that innocence and beauty I had as a child when I started my own family, and my children brought me back some of that spirit.

Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.

Women must tell men always that they are the strong ones. They are the big, the strong, the wonderful. In truth, women are the strong ones. It is just my opinion, I am not a professor.

I didn’t have a father figure in the house.

It is possible to live happily in the here and the now. So many conditions of happiness are available – more than enough for you to be happy right now. You don’t have to run into the future in order to get more.

For a long time I was scared I’d find out I was like my mother.

Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.

Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.

I’ve been my mom’s kitchen helper since I was a little kid.

Nobody looks like they did when they were 20, so why not take advantage of the fact that you’re changing, emotionally as well as physically?

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

What’s the greater risk? Letting go of what people think – or letting go of how I feel, what I believe, and who I am?

The truth is: Belonging starts with self-acceptance. Your level of belonging, in fact, can never be greater than your level of self-acceptance, because believing that you’re enough is what gives you the courage to be authentic, vulnerable and imperfect.

Your Highest Self only wants you to be at peace. It does not judge, compare, or demand that you defeat anyone or be better than anyone.

My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit as well as physically.

Once you have six children, you’re committed.

‚Born this Way‘ is about being yourself, and loving who you are and being proud.

Where thou art, that is home.

I hear my friends and my mom tell me I’m special, but honestly, I still don’t get it.