I was bullied as a boy – lots of kids are, but hopefully most of us get on with our lives and grow up.

It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.

When I was a child, I was very poor and wanted everything. So when I got money, I began buying things.

My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.

I brought myself down. I impeached myself by resigning.

A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

You’re not going to say anything about me that I’m not going to say about myself. There’s so many things that I think about myself; if someone really wanted to get at me, they could say this and this and this. So I’m going to say it before they can. It’s the best policy for me.

If you’re going to be a winner in life, you have to constantly go beyond your best.

Arthur Miller wouldn’t have married me if I had been nothing but a dumb blonde.

There are some Christian people who taste and see and enjoy religion in their own souls, and who get at a deeper knowledge of it than books can ever give them, though they should search all their days.

Where would I be without baseball? Who am I without baseball?

I learned to fly a few years ago in England. It’s the only place I’m completely alone – up in the air, detached from everything.

You can either be a host to God, or a hostage to your ego. It’s your call.

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

If you are against yourself, you will never reach your highest potential. And when you criticize yourself, you’re criticizing God.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

I got the stern end of the stick. It was kind of that iron fist. I am who I am today because of my mother.

Indeed, it is as important to learn how to receive a blessing as it is to be willing to give one.

My lighter, more superficial side will always steal a march on the deeper side and therefore always win. You can’t imagine how often I’ve tried to push away this Anne, which is only half of what is known as Anne – to beat her down, hide her.

I was raised a Catholic on both sides of the family. I went to a Catholic grade school and thought everybody in the country was Catholic, because that’s all I ever was associated with.

Ambition has become a dirty word, and I believe it is a great evolutionary force for the positive. If people fail or go astray in their ambition I can live with it but not with people lowering their expectations, wasting time, slacking off and glorifying failure and stupidity.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

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?

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.

I used to let other people’s struggles affect my happiness. If they weren’t happy, there was no way I was going to be happy. The opposite was also true: If I wasn’t happy, I didn’t want anyone around me to be happy.

A lot of people like to do certain things, but they’re not that good at it. Keep going through the things that you like to do, until you find something that you actually seem to be extremely good at. It can be anything.

I heard that when Christina Aguilera went back to her prom, people, like, booed her. I can’t imagine going through that. If you know that’s going to happen, why put yourself in that situation? I’d rather play for 20,000 screaming people, you know?

Find out who you are. And do it on purpose.

What interests me in life is curiosity, challenges, the good fight with its victories and defeats.

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.

If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.

When your higher self is present, it always promotes peace.

Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it.

I’m tender on the inside.

Who had deceived thee so often as thyself?

I admire people who destroy themselves.

The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim. When you speak out, you are in your power. So change the situation by taking action or by speaking out if necessary or possible; leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.

What is a fear of living? It’s being preeminently afraid of dying. It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity and spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility for yourself – for the time you take up and the space you occupy. If you don’t know what you’re here to do, then just do some good.

When I was writing ‚Kitchen Confidential,‘ I was in my 40s, I had never paid rent on time, I was 10 years behind on my taxes, I had never owned my own furniture or a car.

You get one life. I’m going to embrace mine.

I can express myself.

While musical experts of the world focus on what choir members can do, I would like to focus on what choir members can be.

If you’ve lost your spirit, even living in the richest country in the world can’t help you become rich.

To be able to look back upon ones life in satisfaction, is to live twice.

My faith was tested like Job. That’s the message I try to tell other people: just because you believe in God, serve God, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, people gotta realize, it don’t mean things not gonna happen to you.

He knows my limitations and where I’m a good wife and a good mom.

How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.

Living in America and, of course, just being women in general, we’ve got more strength than we think we do.

We are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence.

Doing the box set is one of those things where you get to rewrite your own history to some extent. We could take out some of the songs that we felt weren’t as strong as some of the others, so you look better.

If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.

Military school was great and especially great for leadership and then I spent two years in Vietnam.

Violent men have not been known in history to die to a man. They die up to a point.

You don’t have to give way to careless speech or complaining. You don’t have to let your feelings get in the way of what God wants to do in your life.

The more successful I become, the more I need a man.

I’m not the sort of person who gives up on things. The first time we crossed the Atlantic in the balloon, it crashed, and we went on and did the Pacific. First time we crossed the Atlantic in a boat, it sank, and we went on and got the record. So, generally speaking, we will pick ourselves up, brush ourselves down, and carry on.