I’m not concerned with people seeing me in a certain way. Some people see me as a kid, some people see me as an adult. But I’m seriously not going to complain how anybody sees me, as long as they see me.

Cassius Clay is a name that white people gave to my slave master. Now that I am free, that I don’t belong anymore to anyone, that I’m not a slave anymore, I gave back their white name, and I chose a beautiful African one.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

As I got older, I guess I became more mellow and more forgiving and more loving.

If you’re trying too hard to be the girl next door, you’re not going to be.

The essential lesson I’ve learned in life is to just be yourself. Treasure the magnificent being that you are and recognize first and foremost you’re not here as a human being only. You’re a spiritual being having a human experience.

It’s simple, if it jiggles, it’s fat.

What is earnest is not always true; on the contrary, error is often more earnest than truth.

There are very few people who really appreciate my shows. People come to the show and they pay and they enjoy it, but I don’t really think most people really understand what they’ve seen.

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.

I want to be the greatest actor that ever lived, frankly. I’d love that. But I don’t need to be. I just want to be here. That’s it.

Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.

How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact!

We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself.

I don’t have this feeling that 70 is really old.

It’s hard to articulate how I think about myself as a public figure.

Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.

Maybe every city has a unique sensibility, but we don’t have names for what they are or haven’t identified them all. We can’t pinpoint exactly what makes each city’s people unique yet.

I define nothing. Not beauty, not patriotism. I take each thing as it is, without prior rules about what it should be.

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.

Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.

I would love to continue in music, with writing… but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens, I will bow down gracefully, raise my kids, and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don’t need to be blonde when I’m 60!

In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.

Just as the soul fills the body, so God fills the world. Just as the soul bears the body, so God endures the world. Just as the soul sees but is not seen, so God sees but is not seen. Just as the soul feeds the body, so God gives food to the world.

Self-worth comes from one thing – thinking that you are worthy.

We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Ever since I dated a woman, I know what it is to grab a curve on a woman’s body. Skinny’s not fine when the lights are low.

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

I’m a whopping 5 foot 4 inches tall. I’m not going to get any taller.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

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

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

What good is it being Marilyn Monroe? Why can’t I just be an ordinary woman?

And, honestly, if somebody wants to criticize me for not being a trainwreck, that’s fine with me!

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

In the West, as well as some other parts of the world, the personal sense of ego tends to predominate, whereas in other areas, there is a more collective sense of ego. This collective ego emphasizes the ‚we‘ rather than the ‚I.‘

Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.

Not everyone loves me, but I have to be okay no matter what they think about me.

Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

Sometimes we be playing the politics too much and forget who we are just to win.

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

I don’t think the Christian Right dominates America in the way some in the media believe they do.

I think all women go through periods where we hate this about ourselves, we don’t like that. It’s great to get to a place where you dismiss anything you’re worried about. I find flaws attractive. I find scars attractive.

In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind – in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: the storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.

Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

Lady Gaga is my name. If you know me, and you call me Stefani, you don’t really know me at all.

I’m just trying to be myself. I’m not trying to be anyone else.

The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.

September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the U.S. government does in the world and how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That’s all to the good.

My aim is to make the poor look rich and the rich look poor.

We think that the world is a solid, vivid place, full of shape and colour and solid objects like this table and this microphone and so on, but we actually create that in our heads out of the bits of information that hit the back of our eyeballs or hit our eardrums or hit our tongues or whatever.

I’m nobody, who are you?

When I was 18, I thought that, to be a romantic, you couldn’t live past 30.

If somebody thinks they’re a hedgehog, presumably you just give ‚em a mirror and a few pictures of hedgehogs and tell them to sort it out for themselves.

I think being an atheist is something you are, not something you do.

I think it’s important as an artist to never forget where you’re from.

People do dismiss ambient music, don’t they? They call it ‚easy listening,‘ as if to suggest that it should be hard to listen to.