I’m mortified to be on the stage, but then again, it’s the only place where I’m happy.

We all have a tendency to avoid our weaknesses. When we do that, we never progress or get any better.

What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money.

A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.

To this day, some of my closest friends say, ‚Gaga, you know, everything’s great. You’re a singer; your dreams have come true.‘ But, still, when certain things are said to you over and over again as you’re growing up, it stays with you and you wonder if they’re true.

Hollywood is not suited for me, and I am not suited for it.

If I died tomorrow, I would be a happy girl.

I’m always cast in these strange men… that’s not me, really.

Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one’s potential.

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings.

I don’t have any secrets I need kept any more.

You can bear your own faults, and why not a fault in your wife?

I grew up in a funny way.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

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

I’m very at ease, and I like it. I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn’t think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that’s happening to me. I’m rather surprised at who I am, because I’m actually like my dad!

You’re going to go through tough times – that’s life. But I say, ‚Nothing happens to you, it happens for you.‘ See the positive in negative events.

Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.

They must often change, who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.

The way I approach this thing, when I started to get my head screwed on straight and really trying to make something of myself as an artist, when I was 19 or 20, it became more about function for me. Like, what is this song doing to you? What is the function of this type of artform? What is it doing?

You have to just make the choices you make in life. I made the choices I made because I believed they were right for me.

All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me… You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.

Delhi means everything to me. This city has given me everything, and I love it.

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

For me, ‚risky‘ is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.

Let each know that for each the body, the mind and the soul have been freed to fulfill themselves.

Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself.

I’m not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one of those people.

I’ve always believed in God. I also think that’s the sort of thing that either comes as part of the equipment, the capacity to believe, or at some point in your life, when you’re in a position where you actually need help from a power greater than yourself, you simply make an agreement.

In order to heal others, we first need to heal ourselves. And to heal ourselves, we need to know how to deal with ourselves.

For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories.

I realize I don’t do a very good job in keeping up to date, but I try to.

Where fear is, happiness is not.

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?

I just really believe people have to get hungry. I think maybe what we need to do, instead of trying to stuff our beliefs down people’s throats, is just pray for them to really be hungry and to see their neediness.

I worked out early on to give up things I couldn’t do well at all.

I liked school, but I used to dread those moments when the teacher would call me up to give an oral report. I forced myself to deal with it and not dwell on the class in front of me – to keep a straight face, give the report and concentrate on getting it right. That’s normally how I perform. That’s how I am.

Libraries raised me.

The happiest people in the world are those who feel absolutely terrific about themselves, and this is the natural outgrowth of accepting total responsibility for every part of their life.

If we don’t plant the right things, we will reap the wrong things. It goes without saying. And you don’t have to be, you know, a brilliant biochemist and you don’t have to have an IQ of 150. Just common sense tells you to be kind, ninny, fool. Be kind.

The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent dead wood.

Always remember that others may hate you but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.

You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life, and what you’ve become yourself.

I spent most of the early years of my walk with God focused on what was wrong with me. Most of us probably do that, hoping to change ourselves.

Impart as much as you can of your spiritual being to those who are on the road with you, and accept as something precious what comes back to you from them.

All my adult life people have been helping me.

If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.

Christmas time! That man must be a misanthrope indeed, in whose breast something like a jovial feeling is not roused – in whose mind some pleasant associations are not awakened – by the recurrence of Christmas.

Even as you make progress, you need the discipline to keep from backtracking and sabotaging the success as it’s happening.

No one should be ashamed to admit he is wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

I will not be concerned at other men’s not knowing me; I will be concerned at my own want of ability.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

I love it when people say things to me in public and want to meet me, because I want to meet them! Early on, my manager told me, ‚If you want to sell 500,000 records, then go out there and meet 500,000 people.‘

We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves.

Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future.

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.

I think, for years, people have been pushed down by religion, and I don’t say that disrespectfully, but they’ve been shown a God that you can’t measure up to.