"Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough. Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough. When you have self-respect, you have enough"
About this Quote
The stacked repetitions - "Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough". - read like a chorus of American anxieties, each word carrying a different institution on its back: the workplace, the mirror, the bank, the moral performance economy. "Thin enough" is the tell. It punctures the myth that striving is always noble by naming how aspiration gets rerouted into self-surveillance, especially for women. Sheehy’s list also anticipates the way virtue becomes competitive: even responsibility is something you can fail at publicly.
Then she pivots from external benchmarks to an internal standard: self-respect. That’s the subtextual switch from scarcity to sufficiency. Sheehy isn’t arguing for complacency; she’s arguing for sovereignty. "Enough" becomes a psychological boundary, not a number. In the late-20th-century world of self-help optimism and status hunger - and in today’s quantified, curated life - this lands as a corrective: the only sustainable counterweight to endless comparison is a form of dignity that can’t be crowdsourced.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Love |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Sheehy, Gail. (2026, January 16). Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough. Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough. When you have self-respect, you have enough. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/would-that-there-were-an-award-for-people-who-90835/
Chicago Style
Sheehy, Gail. "Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough. Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough. When you have self-respect, you have enough." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/would-that-there-were-an-award-for-people-who-90835/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Would that there were an award for people who come to understand the concept of enough. Good enough. Successful enough. Thin enough. Rich enough. Socially responsible enough. When you have self-respect, you have enough." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/would-that-there-were-an-award-for-people-who-90835/. Accessed 23 Feb. 2026.
