Self Quotes

There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one's self, the very meaning of one's soul.

When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it's amazing what they can accomplish.

You have to do your own growing no matter how tall your grandfather was.

If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one's own self-deception and ignorance.

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation.

I never loved another person the way I loved myself.

In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed... It means facing a system that does not lend its self to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.

To be ones self and unafraid whether right or wrong is more admirable than the easy cowardice of surrender to conformity.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could do for themselves.

He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.

Keep a diary, and someday it'll keep you

An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word "love"- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.

It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him.

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever.

Each of us has the right and the responsibility to assess the roads which lie ahead, and those over which we have traveled, and if the future road looms ominous or unpromising, and the roads back uninviting, then we need to gather our resolve and, carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that as well.

The self-confidence of the warrior is not the self-confidence of the average man. The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness. The average man is hooked to his fellow men, while the warrior is hooked only to infinity.

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.

Don't knock masturbation. It's sex with someone I love.

Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.

It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; . . . the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.

To ease another’s heartache is to forget one’s own.

Be led by your talent, not by your self-loathing; those other things you just have to manage.

Tears shed for self are tears of weakness, but tears shed for others are a sign of strength.

More enduringly than any other sport, wrestling teaches self-control and pride. Some have wrestled without great skill - none have wrestled without pride.

The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.

In order to succeed, people need a sense of self-efficacy, to struggle together with resilience to meet the inevitable obstacles and inequities of life.

When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign is solitude.

I have found that if you love life, life will love you back.

Human rights' are a fine thing, but how can we make ourselves sure that our rights do not expand at the expense of the rights of others. A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity. If we do not wish to be ruled by a coercive authority, then each of us must rein himself in...A stable society is achieved not by balancing opposing forces but by conscious self-limitation: by the principle that we are always duty-bound to defer to the sense of moral justice.

There is always the temptation in life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for years on end. It is all so self conscience, so apparently moral...But I won't have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous...more extravagant and bright. We are...raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still like dust, I'll rise.

Many people dedicate their lives to actualizing a concept of what they should be like, rather than actualizing themselves. This difference between self-actualization and self-image actualization is very important. Most people live only for their image

Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures - be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.

We have always known that heedless self interest was bad morals, we now know that it is bad economics.

I regard it as the foremost task of education to insure the survival of these qualities: an enterprising curiosity, an undefeatable spirit, tenacity in pursuit, readiness for sensible self denial, and above all, compassion

If we continue to think and live as if we belong only to different cultures and different religions, with separate missions and goals, we will always be in self-defeating competition with each other. Once we realize we are all members of humanity, we will want to compete in the spirit of love.

Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo—-which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.

People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of a person. They didn't see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts, then they white-masked themselves by calling me the lewd one.

There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.

Laugh at yourself and at life. Not in the spirit of derision or whining self-pity, but as a remedy, a miracle drug, that will ease your pain, cure your depression, and help you to put in perspective that seemingly terrible defeat... Never take yourself too seriously.

Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.

He who conquers others is strong; He who conquers himself is mighty.

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

If babies held the same tendency toward self-criticism as adults, they might never learn to walk or talk. Can you imagine infants stomping, 'Aarggh! Screwed up again!' Fortunately, babies are free of self-criticism. They just keep practicing.

Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self-discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that's real power.

As you become more clear about who you really are, you'll be better able to decide what is best for you - the first time around.

Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world.

Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead.

I do the very best I know how - the very best I can; and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.

Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.

The world is so full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking. So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage. He has little competition.

Football is like life - it requires perseverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority.

Others may question your credentials, your papers, your degrees. Others may look for all kinds of ways to diminish your worth. But what is inside you no one can take from you or tarnish. This is your worth, who you really are, your degree that can go with you wherever you go, that you bring with you the moment you come into a room, that can't be manipulated or shaken. Without that sense of self, no amount of paper, no pedigree, and no credentials can make you legit. No matter what, you have to feel legit inside first.

The first and the best victory is to conquer self.

If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself, if you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.

Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and importance, although difficult, is the highroad to pride, self-esteem, and personal satisfaction.

Self-disciplined begins with the mastery of your thoughts. If you don't control what you think, you can't control what you do. Simply, self-discipline enables you to think first and act afterward.

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own.

Anarchism, to me, means not only the denial of authority, not only a new economy, but a revision of the principles of morality. It means the development of the individual as well as the assertion of the individual. It means self-responsibility, and not leader worship.

For the wise have always known that no one can make much of his life until self-searching has become a regular habit, until he is able to admit and accept what he finds, and until he patiently and persistently tries to correct what is wrong.

I think self-awareness is probably the most important thing towards being a champion.

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.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading"ﾂｦis the search for a difficult pleasure.

He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.

Depression is a disorder of mood, so mysteriously painful and elusive in the way it becomes known to the self — to the mediating intellect— as to verge close to being beyond description. It thus remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode.

Someone else's vision will never be as good as your own vision of your self. Live and die with it 'cause in the end it's all you have. Lose it and you lose yourself and everything else. I should have listened to myself.

Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.

Humility is nothing but the disappearance of self in the vision that God is all.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.

Absence from those we love is self from self - a deadly banishment.

Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it.

Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.

Honor your self. Worship your self. Meditate on your self. God dwells within you as you.

It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.'

The voice of our original self is often muffled, overwhelmed, even strangled, by the voices of other people's expectations.

[To] know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility . . .

There is but One God, His name is Truth, He is the Creator, He fears none, he is without hate, He never dies, He is beyond the cycle of births and death, He is self illuminated, He is realized by the kindness of the True Guru. He was True in the beginning, He was True when the ages commenced and has ever been True, He is also True now.

I've learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our disposition and not on our circumstances.

I am never bored; to be bored is an insult to one's self.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.

Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery.

Life is indeed difficult, partly because of the real difficulties we must overcome in order to survive, and partly because of our own innate desire to always do better, to overcome new challenges, to self-actualize. Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.

And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.

People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice - no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.

Friendship without self-interest is one of the rare and beautiful things of life.

As for myself, I always willingly acknowledge my own self as the principal cause of every good and of every evil which may befall me; therefore I have always found myself capable of being my own pupil, and ready to love my teacher.

There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything to others, but lose nothing of yourself.

To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe — to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it — is a wonder beyond words.

The way to find out about happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you are really happy "” not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self-analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what is called following your bliss.

The only tyrant I accept in this world is the 'still small voice' within me

The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.

Today Lord I am going to do my best with Your help and for Your glory. I realize that there are many different people in the world with a variety of opinions and expectations. I will concentrate on being a God-pleaser and not a self-pleaser or man-pleaser. The rest I leave in Your hands lord. Grant me favor with You and with men and continue transforming me into the image of Your dear Son. Thank You Lord.

After all these years, I am still involved in the process of self-discovery. It's better to explore life and make mistakes than to play it safe. Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.

Respect for self is the beginning of cultivating virtue in men and women.

If human emotions largely result from thinking, then one may appreciably control one's feelings by controlling one's thoughts - or by changing the internalized sentences, or self-talk, with which one largely created the feeling in the first place.

There is no greater delight than to be conscious of sincerity on self-examination.

Women need real moments of solitude and self reflection to balance out how much of ourselves we give away.

He is his own best friend and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy and is afraid of solitude.

Self-praise is for losers. Be a winner. Stand for something. Always have class, and be humble.

Know yourself. Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.

There is a God part in you. The consciousness. The pure Self. Learn to listen the voice of that Power.

Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? ...We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.

Our stories are all stories of searching. We search for a good self to be and for good work to do. We search to become human in a world that tempts us always to be less than human or looks to us to be more. We search to love and to be loved. And in a world where it is often hard to believe in much of anything, we search to believe in something holy and beautiful and life-transcending that will give meaning and purpose to the lives we live.

It is naive to think that self-assertiveness is easy. To live self-assertively—which means to live authentically—is an act of high courage. That is why so many people spend the better part of their lives in hiding—from others and also from themselves.

The Kurdish people have the right of self-determination like every other nation in the world.

As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world - that is the myth of the atomic age - as in being able to remake ourselves.

My significant other right now is myself, which is what happens when you suffer from multiple personality disorder and self-obsession.

The most comprehensive formulation of therapeutic goals is the striving for wholeheartedness: to be without pretense, to be emotionally sincere, to be able to put the whole of oneself into one's feelings, one's work, one's beliefs.

The best lightning rod for your protection is your own spine.

a human being is never what he is but the self he seeks.

I must learn to love the fool in me - the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries.

All good work requires self-revelation.

Hell, in my opinion, is never finding your true self and never living your own life or knowing who you are.

Practice sharing the fullness of your being, your best self, your enthusiasm, your vitality, your spirit, your trust, your openness, above all, your presence. Share it with yourself, with your family, with the world.

Act as young as you feel. You're not getting older; you're getting more entitled to be your fabulous self.

There can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which is within the souls of men.

Humility is the displacement of self by the enthronement of God.

The biggest enemies of willpower: temptation, self-criticism, and stress. (...) these three skills —self-awareness, self-care, and remembering what matter most— are the foundation for self-control.

The one self-knowledge worth having is to know one's own mind.

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.

The original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world's weather

Loyalty, Signor Molteni, not love. Penelope is loyal to Ulysses but we do not know how far she loved him...and as you know people can sometimes be absolutely loyal without loving. In certain cases, in fact, loyalty is form of vengeance, of black-mail, of recovering one's self-respect. Loyalty, not love.

They who have no central purpose in their life fall an easy prey to petty worries, fears, troubles, and self-pitying, all of which are indications of weakness, which lead, just as surely as deliberately planned sins (though by a different route), to failure, unhappiness, and loss, for weakness cannot persist in a power evolving universe.

Only through our connectedness to others can we really know and enhance the self. And only through working on the self can we begin to enhance our connectedness to others.

Happiness is attained, not through self-interest, but through unconditional fidelity in endless love of eternal light.

A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys, and keys to fit our locks. When we feel safe enough to open the locks, our truest selves step out and we can be completely and honestly who we are; we can be loved for who we are and not for who we're pretending to be. Each unveils the best part of the other. No matter what else goes wrong around us, with that one person we're safe in our own paradise.

There are three faithful friends - an old wife, an old dog, and ready money.

Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope.

One of the hardest expressions of self-assertiveness is challenging your limiting beliefs.

Actually, all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child’s coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself.

One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide.

The two biggest self-deceptions of all are that life has a 'meaning'and each of us is unique.

There is no such thing as a "self-made" man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our success.

The greater a child's terror, and the earlier it is experienced, the harder it becomes to develop a strong and healthy sense of self.

Honesty is the cruelest game of all, because not only can you hurt someone - and hurt them to the bone - you can feel self-righteous about it at the same time.

No one is in control of your happiness but you; therefore, you have the power to change anything about yourself or your life that you want to change.

You grow up the day you have the first real laugh at yourself.

When you are tough on yourself, life is going to be infinitely easier on you.

Good manners reflect something from inside-an innate sense of consideration for others and respect for self.

Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves.

Men follow their sentiments and their self-interest, but it pleases them to imagine that they follow reason. And so they look for, and always find, some theory which, a posteriori, makes their actions appear to be logical. If that theory could be demolished scientifically, the only result would be that another theory would be substituted for the first one, and for the same purpose.

one must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one’s own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others

If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.

The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear and get a record of successful experiences behind you.

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place, for where we are is hell, And where hell is there must we ever be.

Fishing provides that connection with the whole living world. It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way. A form of meditation, some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self.

There is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and defended a people's safety and greatness.

He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser.

I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent; curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas.

There are very many characteristics which go into making a model civil servant. Prominent among them are probity, industry, good sense, good habits, good temper, patience, order, courtesy, tact, self-reliance, many deference to superior officers, and many consideration for inferiors.

Effective health care depends on self-care; this fact is currently heralded as if it were a discovery.

How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.

What is passion? It is surely the becoming of a person. Are we not, for most of our lives, marking time? Most of our being is at rest, unlived. In passion, the body and the spirit seek expression outside of self. Passion is all that is other from self. Sex is only interesting when it releases passion. The more extreme and the more expressed that passion is, the more unbearable does life seem without it. It reminds us that if passion dies or is denied, we are partly dead and that soon, come what may, we will be wholly so.

It is a human defect—to try to know one's self by the self of another.

Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.

There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies.

What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?' 'History is the lies of the victors,' I replied, a little too quickly. 'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. ... 'Finn?' '"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." (quoting Patrick Lagrange)

Well, love is insanity. The ancient Greeks knew that. It is the taking over of a rational and lucid mind by delusion and self-destruction. You lose yourself, you have no power over yourself, you can't even think straight.

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows, My friends forsake me like a memory lost; I am the self-consumer of my woes, They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost; And yet I am, and live with shadows tost.

Never mind. The self is the least of it. Let our scars fall in love.

Learn to be quiet enough to hear the genuine within yourself so that you can hear it in others.

Anyone too undisciplined, too self-righteous or too self-centered to live in the world as it is has a tendency to idealize a world which ought to be. But no matter what political or religious direction such idealists choose, their visions always share one telling characteristic: in their utopias, heavens or brave new worlds, their greatest personal weakness suddenly appears to be a strength.

I've learned that I must find positive outlets for anger or it will destroy me. There is a certain anger: it reaches such intensity that to express it fully would require homicidal rage—self destructive, destroy the world rage—and its flame burns because the world is so unjust. I have to try to find a way to channel that anger to the positive, and the highest positive is forgiveness.

The Bible and several other self help or enlightenment books cite the Seven Deadly Sins. They are: pride, greed, lust, envy, wrath, sloth, and gluttony. That pretty much covers everything that we do, that is sinful... or fun for that matter.

The content of most textbooks is perishable, but the tools of self-directedness serve one well over time.

It is disgraceful to live at the cost of one's self-respect. Self-respect is the most vital factor in life. Without it, man is a cipher. To live worthily with self-respect, one has to overcome difficulties. It is out of hard and ceaseless struggle alone that one derives strength, confidence and recognition.

My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.

It's when we face for a moment the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know the taint in our own selves, that awe cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart.

Accountability is the essence of democracy. If people do not know what their government is doing, they cannot be truly self-governing. The national security state assumes the government secrets are too important to be shared, that only those in the know can see classified information, that only the president has all the facts, that we must simply trust that our rulers of acting in our interest.

... suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us extraordinary

The greatest gift is a portion of thyself.

Never feel self-pity, the most destructive emotion there is. How awful to caught up in the terrible squirrel cage of self.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

If this earth should ever be destroyed, it will be by desire, by the lust of pleasure and self-gratification, by greed of the green frog skin, by people who are mindful of their own self, forgetting about the wants of others.

The founders of the Republic dealt with things as they were presented to them, in a spirit of self sacrificing Patriotism and as time has proved, with a comprehensive wisdom which it will always be safe for us to consult

Human beings are drawn to cats because they are all we are not — self-contained, elegant in everything they do, relaxed, assured, glad of company, yet still possessing secret lives.

Instinct is intelligence incapable of self-consciousness.

All conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.

What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, 'Write what you know.' It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.

However self-sufficient we may fancy ourselves, we exist only in relation — to our friend, family, and life partners; to those we teach and mentor; to our co-workers, neighbors, strangers; and even to forces we cannot fully conceive of, let alone define. In many ways, we are our relationships.

It is proper for people to have friends, friendships without self-interest. Without friends, life is too lonely.

I am more afraid that this people have so much confidence in their leaders that they will not inquire for themselves of God whether they are led by him. I am fearful they settle down in a state of blind self security. Let every man and woman know, by the whispering of the Spirit of God to themselves, whether their leaders are walking in the path the Lord dictates, or not.

My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different from others. My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings

Fear is a question. What are you afraid of and why? Our fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if we explore them.

But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster.

But insight doesn't necessarily produce self-control. Sometimes you just see your destructiveness more clearly.

Amongst the learned the lawyers claim first place, the most self-satisfied class of people, as they roll their rock of Sisyphus and string together six hundred laws in the same breath, no matter whether relevant or not, piling up opinion on opinion and gloss on gloss to make their profession seem the most difficult of all. Anything which causes trouble has special merit in their eyes.

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.

Set me a task in which I can put something of my very self, and it is a task no longer; it is joy; it is art.

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

Self-love is the source of all our other loves.

Anarchists know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.

If you aren't good at loving yourself, you will have a difficult time loving anyone, since you'll resent the time and energy you give another person that you aren't even giving to yourself.

Self-respect is the cornerstone of all virtue.

One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.

The snow itself is lonely or, if you prefer, self-sufficient. There is no other time when the whole world seems composed of one thing and one thing only.

The hardest period in life is one's twenties. It's a shame because you're your most gorgeous, and you're physically in peak condition. But it's actually when you're most insecure and full of self-doubt. When you don't know what's going to happen, it's frightening.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.

Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant."

The whole value of solitude depends upon oneself; it may be a sanctuary or a prison, a haven of repose or a place of punishment, a heaven or a hell, as we ourselves make it.

Owing to ignorance of the rope the rope appears to be a snake; owing to ignorance of the Self the transient state arises of the individualized, limited, phenomenal aspect of the Self.

If you don't have liberty and self-determination, you've got nothing, that's what this is what this country is built on. And this is the ultimate self-determination, when you determine how and when you're going to die when you're suffering.

The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-trust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciples.

The only discipline that lasts is self-discipline.

Read. Read all the time. Read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life.

All men are sculptors, constantly chipping away the unwanted parts of their lives, trying to create their idea of a masterpiece.

Love yourself first and everything falls into line.

I want to be judged by who I am as a person, not by what happened to me. In fact, all the bad things have only contributed to my confidence and sense of self, because I survived them and became a better and stronger person.

There is overwhelming evidence that the higher the level of self-esteem, the more likely one will be to treat others with respect, kindness, and generosity.

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self- solitude is the enemy of well- being.

I don't know Who, or what, put the question, I don't know when it was put. I don't even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone, or Something,and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.

The hardest people to reach with the love of God are not the bad people. They know they are bad. They have no defense. The hardest ones to win for God are the self-righteous people.

Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.

My idea of feminism is self-determination, and it's very open-ended: every woman has the right to become herself, and do whatever she needs to do.

Self-esteem is different than conceit. Conceit is the weirdest disease in the world. It makes everyone sick except the one who has it.

Doesn't the fight for survival also justify swindle and theft? In self defence, anything goes.

Narcissism and self-deception are survival mechanisms without which many of us might just jump off a bridge.

The public does not like you to mislead or represent yourself to be something you're not. And the other thing that the public really does like is the self-examination to say, you know, I'm not perfect. I'm just like you. They don't ask their public officials to be perfect. They just ask them to be smart, truthful, honest, and show a modicum of good sense.

Self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it.

When you please others in hopes of being accepted, you lose you self-worth in the process.

I guessed life was like that. You gained and you lost, and if you saved anything from the ruins, even if only a shred of self-respect, it was enough to take you through the next bit.

Those who have accomplished the greatest results are those...who never grow excited or lose self-control, but are always calm, self-possessed, patient and polite.

It is not what we get. But who we become, what we contribute... that gives meaning to our lives.

The never-ending task of self improvement.

If we do not discipline ourselves the world will do it for us.

I feel exquisite pleasure in dwelling on the recollections of childhood, before misfortune had tainted my mind, and changed its bright visions of extensive usefulness into gloomy and narrow reflections upon self.

Jesus is not your accuser. He's not your prosecutor. He's not your judge. He's your friend and your rescuer. Like Zacchaeus, just spend time with Jesus. Don't hide from him in shame or reject him in self-righteousness. Don't allow the opinions of other people to shape your concept of him. Get to know him for yourself, and let the goodness of God change you from the inside out.

Seldom can the heart be lonely, If it seek a lonelier still; Self-forgetting, seeking only Emptier cups of love to fill.

Self-reliance is the best defence against the pressures of the moment.

I am neither male nor female, nor am I sexless. I am the Peaceful One, whose form is self-effulgent, powerful radiance.

Everything turns out to be valuable that one does for one's self without thought of profit.

Self-improvement is the name of the game, and your primary objective is to strengthen yourself, not to destroy an opponent.

It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and to forget his own.

Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It's what I've never seen before that I recognize.

And partly, the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.

A man has only one escape from his old self: to see a different self in the mirror of some woman's eyes.

Every woman who has come to consciousness can recall an almost endless series of oppressive, violating, insulting, assaulting acts against her Self. Every woman is battered by such assaults - is on a psychic level, a battered woman.

Our ideals are our better selves.

To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

Punishment may make us obey the orders we are given, but at best it will only teach an obedience to authority, not a self-control which enhances our self-respect.

Any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster.

So, the path of the co-creator is to be awakened spiritually within, which then turns into your own deeper life purpose, which then makes you want to reach out and touch others in a way that expresses self and really evolves our communities and our world. Certainly, we can't do that unless we activate ourselves first. That's why, for me, emergence is the shift from ego to essence. That is so important.

To lose one's self in reverie, one must be either very happy, or very unhappy. Reverie is the child of extremes.

True happiness... is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

Chance is commonly viewed as a self-correcting process in which a deviation in one direction induces a deviation in the opposite direction to restore the equilibrium. In fact, deviations are not corrected as a chance process unfolds, they are merely diluted.

Assume the worst. About everybody. But don't let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious and corrupt asshole shouldn't prevent you from enjoying their company, working with them or finding them entertaining.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

Everyone, in some small sacred sanctuary of the self, is nuts.

The is a secret for greater self-control, the science points to one thing: the power of paying attention.

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.

Nothing is so foolish, they say, as for a man to stand for office and woo the crowd to win its vote, buy its support with presents, court the applause of all those fools and feel self-satisfied when they cry their approval, and then in his hour of triumph to be carried round like an effigy for the public to stare at, and end up cast in bronze to stand in the market place.

We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.

I would not send a poor girl into the world, ignorant of the snares that beset her path; nor would I watch and guard her, till, deprived of self-respect and self-reliance, she lost the power or the will to watch and guard herself.

Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.

It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under value them.

I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I was not poor, I was needy. They told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived. Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still do not have a dime but I have a great vocabulary.

The human mind is a fearful instrument of adaptation, and in nothing is this more clearly shown than in its mysterious powers of resilience, self-protection, and self-healing. Unless an event completely shatters the order of one's life, the mind, if it has youth and health and time enough, accepts the inevitable and gets itself ready for the next happening like a grimly dutiful American tourist who, on arriving at a new town, looks around him, takes his bearings, and says, "Well, where do I go from here?

Excuse me, there's no pretense here. I happen to be genuinely self-absorbed and deeply shallow.

However, when we are depressed, being reminded of other people's suffering only serves to increase our self-hatred.

A hard truth: that courage can be without meaning or impact, need not be rewarded, or even known. The world has not been made in that way. Perhaps, however, within the self there might come a resonance, the awareness of having done something difficult, of having done . . . something.

Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges toward an ideal view; it is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness.

It doth make a man better,' quoth Robin Hood, 'to bear of those noble men so long ago. When one doth list to such tales, his soul doth say, 'put by thy poor little likings and seek to do likewise.' Truly, one may not do as nobly one's self, but in the striving one is better...

I think high self-esteem is overrated. A little low self-esteem is actually quite good. Maybe you're not the best, so you should work a little harder.

Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.

The person we believe ourselves to be will always act in a manner consistent with our self-image.

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control; these three alone lead one to sovereign power.

As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task.

A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the oneself that there is no self left to die.

Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, your fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if you explore them.

The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves. Surrender to a leader is not a means to an end but a fulfillment. Whither they are led is of secondary importance.

A woman who is self-reliant, positive, optimistic, and undertakes her work with the assurance of success magnetizes her condition. She draws to herself the creative powers of the universe.

I have suffered my self to be politically sacrificed to save my country from ruin and disgrace and if I am never a gain elected I will have the gratification to know that I have done my duty.

To know is not too demanding: it merely requires memory and time. But to understand is quite a different matter: it requires intellectual ability and training, a self conscious awareness of what one is doing, experience in techniques of analysis and synthesis, and above all, perspective.

True happiness arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self, and in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.

By constant self-discipline and self-control you can develop greatness of character.

Could hell be a place where there is no self-respect? A place where people have no pride in their own existence or behavior, and thus would have none for anyone or anything else?

Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take.

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.

If we examine every stage of our lives, we find that from our first breath to our last we are under the constraint of circumstances. And yet we still possess the greatest of all freedoms, the power of developing our innermost selves in harmony with the moral order of the universe, and so winning peace of heart whatever obstacles we meet.

Where there is a sufficient social movement of self-reliant communities, there can be political change. There must be political change.

Our self image, strongly held, essentially determines what we become.

I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.

Self esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.

To be one of God's lilies means an interior abandonment of the rarest kind. It means that we are to be infinitely passive, and yet infinitely active also; passive as regards self and its workings, active as regards attention and response to God. It is very hard to explain this so as to be understood But it means that we must lay down all the activity of the creature, as such, and must let only the activities of God work in us, and through us, and by us. Self must step aside, to let God work.

The goal of art was the vital expression of self.

Exaggerated self-importance is deemed an individual fault, but a racial virtue.

The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.

It is only a step from boredom to disillusionment, which leads naturally to self-pity, which in turn ends in chaos.

Meanings, moods, the whole scale of our inner experience, finds in nature the 'correspondences' through which we may know our boundless selves.

He who gives what he would as readily throw away, gives without generosity; for the essence of generosity is in self sacrifice.

The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms; and to confide in one's self, and become something of worth and value is the best and safest course.

When you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself.

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

The man who comes to writing late, but is in essence a writer, may sometimes gain as much as he has lost: his experience of life has given him a subject, he is spared the youthful writer's self-torment and soul-searching.

Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.

Nothing profits more than self-esteem, grounded on what is just and right.

Perfectionism is simply putting a limit on your future. When you have an idea of perfect in your mind, you open the door to constantly comparing what you have now with what you want. That type of self criticism is significantly deterring.

The habit of saving is itself an education; it fosters every virtue, teaches self-denial, cultivates the sense of order, trains to forethought, and so broadens the mind.

For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do.

Self knowledge is always bad news.

It's our very capacity for self-consciousness that makes us self-destructive!

No fine work can be done without concentration and self-sacrifice and toil and doubt.

The tension between 'yes' and 'no', between 'I can' and 'I cannot', makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self.

A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails.

Had we not loved ourselves at all, we could never have been obliged to love anything. So that self-love is the basis of all love.

He who attends to his greater self becomes a great man, and he who attends to his smaller self becomes a small man.

The secret of human happiness is not in self-seeking but in self-forgetting.

If only I may grow: firmer, simpler, quieter, warmer.

We get closer to God as we get more intimately and understandingly acquainted with the things He has created. I know of nothing more inspiring than that of making discoveries for one's self.

In the final analysis, a drawing simply is no longer a drawing, no matter how self-sufficient its execution may be. It is a symbol, and the more profoundly the imaginary lines of projection meet higher dimensions, the better.

Most people with low self-esteem have earned it.

I was being called to surrender the very citadel of my self. I was completely in the dark. I did not really know what repentance was or what I was required to repent of. It was indeed the turning point of my life.

Thus in Christianity the alienation had become total, and it was this total alienation that was the biggest obstacle to the progress of self-consciousness.

My character is self-important, poorly informed, well-intentioned but an idiot, ... So we said, `Let's give him a promotion.

In the history of literature there are many great enduring works which were not published in the lifetimes of the authors. If the authors had not achieved self-affirmation while writing, how could they have continued to write?

It's not the events of our lives that shape us, but our beliefs as to what those events mean.

To establish true self-esteem we must concentrate on our successes and forget about the failures and the negatives in our lives.

But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness - each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked - each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.

Self-suggestion makes you master of yourself.

The mind is everything. What you think you become.

It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.

Obedience is detachment from the self. This is the most radical detachment of all. But what is the self? The self is the principle of reason and responsibility in us. It is the root of freedom, it is what makes us men.

Calm self-confidence is as far from conceit as the desire to earn a decent living is remote from greed.

If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I'm not saying that the truth doesn't matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.

Great men suffer hours of depression through introspection and self-doubt. That is why they are great. That is why you will find modesty and humility the characteristics of such men.

Self-sacrifice which denies common sense is not a virtue. It's a spiritual dissipation.

Neuroscientists have discovered that when you ask the brain to meditate, it gets better, not just at meditating, but at a wide range of self-control skills Over time, [meditators'] brains become finely tuned willpower machines.

I don't like myself, I'm crazy about myself.

In our opposed forms of loneliness and self-recognition and recognition of the other, we touched each other often as we spoke; and on shore in explorations of the past, we strolled with our arms linked...

Self-determination could mean independence, confederacy, federal and autonomy.

The spectacle is at the same time the mirage of self in the mirror of things.

The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.

I shall pray to God to send charity to this hideous world, and sympathy for the weak, and love for the unhappy and unfortunate. I shall ask Him if is indeed His will that a child should suffer and its soul be damned for a little blemish on the body....And I shall pray Him, too, that the hearts of the self-righteous may be broken...

There is no such thing as a self-made man. You will reach your goals only with the help of others.

So let's say you realize that you are never going to be a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. person. You're not cut out for that sort of typical work environment. The benefit might be that if you embrace that and say I need to be self-employed or I need to be doing more project-oriented work. Identify the benefits - I'd be more productive. I'd be happier. The people around me would be happier because my mood would be better. When you identify the benefits of accepting the behavior or habit, you actually give leverage to it and give yourself a better chance of sticking with it.

Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit, simply because it puts the stopper on all self-justificat ion

With self-discipline most anything is possible.

Self knowers always dwell in El Dorado; they drink from the fountain of youth, and at all times owners of all they wish to enjoy.

In many ways I wish I wasn't an actor dragging around the baggage from being one so that I could just devote my energies to encouraging people to find their true selves.

Housework is work directly opposed to the possibility of human self-actualization.

Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their ''evil'' look at such times is no human projection: the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it

Managing our emotions increases intuition and clarity. It helps us self-regulate our brain chemicals and internal hormones. It gives us natural highs, the real fountain of youth we've been searching for. It enables us to drink from elixirs locked within our cells, just waiting for us to discover them.

Icebergs behoove the soul (both being self-made from elements least visible) to see themselves: fleshed, fair, erected, indivisible.

Finding oneself was a misnomer; a self is not found but made.

There is just so much excess in terms of the market for self-remodeling. I think most women are perfectly gorgeous and beautiful the way they are,

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self-service populace, and all our specious comforts -the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria -are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.

The more self-centered and egotistical a guy is, the better ballplayer he's going to be.

Good government is no substitute for self-government.

Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.

What a blind person needs is not a teacher but another self.

The amazing thing is that chaotic systems don't always stay chaotic," Ben said, leaning on the gate. "Sometimes they spontaneously reorganize themselves into an orderly structure." "They suddenly become less chaotic?" I said, wishing that would happen at HiTek. "No, that's the thing. They become more and more chaotic until they reach some sort of chaotic critical mass. When that happens, they spontaneously reorganize themselves at a higher equilibrium level. It's called self-organized criticality.

Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment.

All personal breakthroughs begin with a change in beliefs.

Man was entering under false pretenses the sphere of incredible facilities, acquired too cheaply, below cost price, almost for nothing, and the disproportion between outlay and gain, the obvious fraud on nature, the excessive payment for a trick of genius, had to be offset by self-parody.

The self is the class (not the collection) of the experiences (or autopsychological states). The self does not belong to the expression of the basic experience, but is constructed only on a very high level.

An artist who is self-taught is taught by a very ignorant person indeed.

Many Canadian nationalists harbour the bizarre fear that should we ever reject royalty, we would instantly mutate into Americans, as though the Canadian sense of self is so frail and delicate a bud, that the only thing stopping it from being swallowed whole by the US is an English lady in a funny hat.

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

The worst education which teaches self-denial, is better than the best which teaches everything else, and not that.

It is hard to find beauty in the art of self expression.

The talent for self-justification is surely the finest flower of human evolution, the greatest achievement of the human brain. When it comes to justifying actions, every human being acquires the intelligence of an Einstein, the imagination of a Shakespeare, and the subtlety of a Jesuit.

Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self-understanding and self-discipline.

Too often students are being taught to read as if literature were some kind of ethics class or civics class—or worse, some kind of self-help manual. In fact, the important thing is the way the writer uses the language.

Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.

Simplicity is not an objective in art, but one achieves simplicity despite one's self by entering into the real sense of things.

Liberalism is an attitude rather than a set of dogmas - an attitude that insists upon questioning all plausible and self-evident propositions, seeking not to reject them but to find out what evidence there is to support them rather than their possible alternatives.

...Erich Fromm wondered why most people did not become insane in the face of the existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98ﾃつ｢.

Self-preservation, nature's first great law, all the creatures, except man, doth awe.

Smile, for everyone lacks self-confidence and more than any other one thing a smile reassures them.

Lack of discipline leads to frustration and self-loathing.

Self-conceit may lead to self destruction.

New York is at once cosmopolitan and parochial, a compendium of sentimental certainties. It is in fact the most sentimental of the world's great cities - in its self-congratulation a kind of San Francisco of the East.

The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever.

The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat one's self. All sin is easy after that.

Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.

Man is mortal. Everyone has to die some day or the other. But one must resolve to lay down one's life in enriching the noble ideals of self-respect and in bettering one's human life. We are not slaves. Nothing is more disgraceful for a brave man than to live life devoid of self-respect.

Falsehood often lurks upon the tongue of him, who, by self-praise, seeks to enhance his value in the eyes of others.

I am lithe, but fragile from constant involuntary self-analysis.

There are seeds of self-destruction in all of us that will bear only unhappiness if allowed to grow.

It is always self-defeating to pretend to a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.

Nothing is loathsomer than the self-loathing of a self one loathes.

Try to avoid complaints. Self-pity even when legitimate never fails to undermine your strength.

What is called music today is all too often only a disguise for the monologue of power. However, and this is the supreme irony of it all, never before have musicians tried so hard to communicate with their audience, and never before has that communication been so deceiving. Music now seems hardly more than a somewhat clumsy excuse for the self-glorification of musicians and the growth of a new industrial sector.

My interest lies in my self-expression - what's inside of me - not what I'm in.

When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.

Where's your sense of adventure? It died under mysterious circumstances. My sense of self-preservation found the body, but assures me it has an airtight alibi. -Captain Tagon & Captain Andreyasn

The size of your accomplishments, the quality of your achievement, will depend very largely on how big a man you see in yourself, what sort of image you get of your possible self, yourself at your best.

The problem with self-improvement is knowing when to quit.

Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.

In the half darkness I winked to my other self, my mad dictator, and congratulated him on his droll victory. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth flowing from Shosha's head to my face. What did I have to lose? Nothing more than what everyone loses anyway.

Give me life, give me pain, give me myself again.

Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.

What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent with the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.

Self-love seems so often unrequited.

The way we communicate with others and with ourselves ultimately determines the quality of our lives

Making resolutions is a cleansing ritual of self-assessment and repentance that demands personal honesty and, ultimately, reinforces humility. Breaking them is part of the cycle.

If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started.

Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.

I very linearly [sic] wish you would exert yourself so as to keep all your matters in order your self without depending on others as that is the only way to be happy to have all your business in your own hands.

Nothing is true in self-discovery unless it is true in your own experience. This is the only protection against the robot levels of the mind.

Willful ignorance and endless laws become the replacement for self-education and self-restraint, because ignorance and laws are easy.

Self-respect permeates every aspect of your life.

For a moment the feeling crept over me that my work, my vision, is going to destroy me, and for a fleeting moment I let myself take a long, hard look at myself, something I would not otherwise do—out of instinct, on principle, out of self-preservation—look at myself with objective curiosity to see whether my vision has not destroyed me already. I found it comforting to note that I was still breathing.

What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.

There is no finer sensations in life that which comes with victory over one's self. Go forward to a goal of inward achievement, brushing aside all your old internal enemies as you advance.

Prayer is more than meditation. In meditation, the source of strength is one's self. When one prays, he goes to a source of strength greater than his own.

Self is the root, the tree, and the branches of all the evils of our fallen state.

Peace ... was contingent upon a certain disposition of the soul, a disposition to receive the gift that only detachment from self made possible.

Awakenings are always terrifying as they force you to realize your past has been lived in confinement, the most disturbing part is when you recognize that the shackle holding you down are largely once you have placed upon yourself, the prison is self constructed

God is indeed dead. He died of self-horror when He saw the creature He had made in His own image.

When you come right down to it all you have is yourself. The sun is a thousand rays in your belly. All the rest is nothing.

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

Leadership is an opportunity to serve. It is not a trumpet call to self-importance.

To feel our character, our personality, and our personal, hard-won history fade from being is to be exposed to whatever lies beneath these comforting, operational conveniences. What remains when the conscious and functioning self has been erased is mankind's fundamental condition – irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad.

A "just war" is hospitable to every self-deception on the part of those waging it, none more than the certainty of virtue, under whose shelter every abomination can be committed with a clear conscience.

That man who lives for self alone, Lives for the meanest mortal known.

Baseball gives a growing boy self poise and self reliance.

Freedom comes from strength and self-reliance.

Find a nice, self sufficient hilltop, and fortify it.

But the real secret to total gorgeousness is to believe in yourself, have self confindence, and try to be secure in your decisions and thoughts.

Insist upon yourself. Be original.

The easiest time to cure an illness is before it is accepted as a part of the self-image.

Even the self-assured will raise their perceived self-efficacy if models teach them better ways of doing things.

What is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere - it is an art form in itself.

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them.

Self-defense is the clearest of all laws; and for this reason - the lawyers didn't make it.

We have to look at our own inertia, insecurities, self-hate, fear that, in truth, we have nothing valuable to say. When your writing blooms out of the back of this garbage compost, it is very stable. You are not running from anything. You can have a sense of artistic security. If you are not afraid of the voices inside you, you will not fear the critics outside you.

Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.

We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent or self-satisfied; they are, if sound, the spearhead of progress. If they are fundamentally wrong, free discussion will in time put an end to them.

The punters know that the horse named Morality rarely gets past the post, whereas the nag named Self-interest always runs a good race.

Good breeding is the result of good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others.

What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?

The history of the world is full of men who rose to leadership, by sheer force of self-confidence, bravery and tenacity.

All autobiography is self-indulgent.

Jealousy is indeed a poor medium to secure love, but it is a secure medium to destroy one's self-respect. For jealous people, like dope-fiends, stoop to the lowest level and in the end inspire only disgust and loathing.

Disease can be seen as a call for personal transformation through metamorphosis. It is a transition from the death of your old self into the birth of your new.

Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse.

Being bored is an insult to oneself.

How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself!

The duty of helping one's self in the highest sense involves the helping of one's neighbors.

Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the nonpharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.

A little weeping, a little wheedling, a little self-degradation, a little careful use of our advantages, and then some man will say .Come, be my wife! With good looks and youth marriage is easy to attain. There are men enough; but a woman who has sold herself, even for a ring and a new name, need hold her skirt aside for no creature in the street. They both earn their bread in one way. Marriage for love is the most beautiful external symbol of the union of souls; marriage without it is the least clean traffic that defiles the world.

Happiness, in the ancient, noble sense, means self-fulfillment—and is given to those who use to the fullest whatever talents God … bestowed upon them.

But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.

In my day, we didn't have self-esteem, we had self-respect, and no more of it than we had earned.

Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.

Happiness for the average person may be said to flow largely from common sense - adapting one-self to circumstances - and a sense of humor.

Self-pity is a dead-end road. You make the choice to drive down it. It's up to you to decide to stay parked there or to turn around and drive out.

Love, sought as an escape from the burden of the self, turns rapidly into a captivity.

There are thousands of causes for stress, and one antidote to stress is self-expression. That's what happens to me every day. My thoughts get off my chest, down my sleeves and onto my pad.

I am unjust, but I can strive for justice. My life's unkind, but I can vote for kindness. I, the unloving, say life should be lovely. I, that am blind, cry out against my blindness.

A faith to live by, a self to live with, and a purpose to live for.

We never get to love by hate, least of all by self-hatred.

Charm is a cunning self-forgetfulness.

It is very dangerous to have your self-worth riding on your results as an athlete.

Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world.

Washington is like a self-sealing tank on a military aircraft. When a bullet passes through, it closes up.

The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the grieves and shames of others.

Hatred is self-punishment.

At sixteen I was stupid, confused and indecisive. At twenty-five I was wise, self-confident, prepossessing and assertive. At forty-five I am stupid, confused, insecure and indecisive. Who would have supposed that maturity is only a short break in adolescence?

Self-help must precede help from others. Even for making certain of help from heaven, one has to help oneself.

Now writing is just working your way toward the border that the innermost secret draws around itself, and to cross that line would mean self-destruction. But writing is also an attempt to respect the borderline only for the truly innermost secret, and bit by bit to free the taboos around that core, difficult to admit as they are, from their prison of unspeakability. Not self-destruction but self-redemption. Not being afraid of unavoidable suffering.

Love is when each person is more concerned for the other than for one's self.

You can't defend the indefensible - anything you say sounds self-serving and hypocritical.

Self-plagiarism is style.

With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic motives proper.

It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.

People have been so busy relating to how I look, it's a miracle I didn't become a self-conscious blob of protoplasm.

Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's own self.

I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside me

It's not only the most difficult thing to know one's self, but the most inconvenient.

What we think, we become.

To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect.

The mind's first step to self-awareness must be through the body.

Self-efficacy beliefs differ from outcome expectations, judgments of the likely consequence [that] behavior will produce.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

Every time I start a picture ... I feel the same fear, the same self-doubts . . . and I have only one source on which I can draw, because it comes from within me.

God's designs may be frequent justification for our actions, but it is we, the self-made men, who take the credit.

Courage, I now see, is a journey involving self-doubt and self-examination, with the end never in sight.

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

To take, for example, my own death: what I consider most likely to be true is that death will be the complete and utter end of my existence, with no successor existence of any kind that can be related to me as I now am. And if that is not the case, the next most likely scenario, it seems to me, is something along the lines indicated by Schopenhauer. But neither of these is what I most want. What I want to be true is that I have an individual, innermost self, a soul, which is the real me and which survives my death. That too could be true. But alas, I do not believe it.

New Orleans is one of the two most ingrown, self-obsessed little cities in the United States. (The other is San Francisco.)

Prudent, cautious self-control is wisdom's root.

Self-will so ardent and active that it will break a world to pieces to make a stool to sit on.

Self-observation brings man to the realization of the necessity of self-change. And in observing himself a man notices that self-observation itself brings about certain changes in his inner processes. He begins to understand that self-observation is an instrument of self-change, a means of awakening.

Strive to make proposed solutions as self-executing as possible. As the degree of discretion increases, so too does bureaucracy, delay, and expense.

If you do not conquer self, you will be conquered by self.

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

I don't possess a lot of self-confidence. I'm an actor so I simply act confident every time I hit the stage.

No man can teach another self-knowledge. He can only lead him or her up to self-discovery - the source of truth.

Self-laudation abounds among the unpolished, but nothing can stamp a man more sharply as ill-bred.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and "mangled mind" leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

It is easy enough to write and talk about God while remaining comfortable within the contemporary intellectual climate. Even people who would call themselves unbelievers often use the word gesturally, as a ready-made synonym for mystery. But if nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors a vagueness. If God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time-ravaged self.

Politicians make good company for a while just as children do - their self-enjoyment is contagious. But they soon exhaust their favourite subjects -themselves.

The individual woman is required . . . a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition out of the wreckage of her self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition.

The biographer who writes the life of his subject's self-concept passes through a fade into the inner house of life.

Those who know how to think need no teachers.

It never ceases to amaze me how many of baseball's wounds are self-inflicted.

To have a quiet mind is to possess one's mind wholly; to have a calm spirit is to possess one's self.

Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.

Don't rely on someone else for your happiness and self worth. Only you can be responsible for that. If you can't love and respect yourself - no one else will be able to make that happen. Accept who you are - completely; the good and the bad - and make changes as YOU see fit - not because you think someone else wants you to be different.

Desire then is the invasion of the whole self by the wish, which, as it invades, sets going more and more of the psychical processes; but at the same time, so long as it remains desire, does not succeed in getting possession of the self.

There is something about going to sea. A little bit of discipline, self-discipline and humility are required.

Rebellion against your handicaps gets you nowhere. Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world - making the most of one's best.

Put yourself in a state of mind where you say to yourself, "Here is an opportunity for me to celebrate like never before, my own power, my own ability to get myself to do whatever is necessary.

The struggle of the male to learn to listen to and respect his own intuitive, inner prompting is the greatest challenge of all. His conditioning has been so powerful that it has all but destroyed his ability to be self-aware.

[H]e who spends more than he earns is sowing the winds of needless self indulgence from which he is sure to reap the whirlwinds of trouble and humiliation.

Brazilians need to work on their own national pride. I always think that they suffer from national low-self esteem. It's a lesser-developed country, and they have struggled so much. Sometimes they have an attitude that, if it's Brazilian, it can't be good.

Democracy is direct self-government over all the people, for all the people, by all the people.

Such to me is the new image of aging; growth in self, and service for all mankind.

The Self-Educated are marked by stubborn peculiarities.

If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked.

Is there something in trade that desiccates and flattens out, that turns men into dried leaves at the age of forty? Certainly there is. It is not due to trade but to intensity of self-seeking, combined with narrowness of occupation. Business has destroyed the very knowledge in us of all other natural forces except business.

Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain but it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving.

Censor: A self-appointed snoophound who sticks his nose in other people's business.

The science is in. The facts are there that we have created, man has, a self-inflicted wound that man has created through global warming

You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

Anxiety is the fear of one's self.

There are many reasons for keeping a diary: to make a note of facts that one considers important; to open one's heart, to give vent to one's feelings, to make confessions; from the instinct of economy which sometimes encourages a writer to make good use of even the smallest crumbs of his life, so that he may have one more book to publish; or again from vanity and self- satisfaction.

A frequent change of role, and of the lighter sort - especially such as one does not like forcing one's self to use the very utmost of his ability in the performance of - is the training requisite for a mastery of the actor's art.

Offended self-love never forgives.

[Travel seems] not just a way of having a good time, but something that every self-respecting citizen ought to undertake, like a high-fiber diet, say, or a deodorant.

I am the miracle.

You cannot hate other people without hating your self.

I used to believe the government was the answer to all our problems. But the . . .government, I've concluded, is now aninsufferable jungle of self-serving bureaucrats.

The dynamo of our economic system is self-interest which may range from mere petty greed to admirable types of self-expression.

We are the creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will, more than of reason or even of self-interest. Even in the common transactions and daily intercourse of life, we are governed by whim, caprice, prejudice, or accident. The falling of a teacup puts us out of temper for the day; and a quarrel that commenced about the pattern of a gown may end only with our lives.

To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one's own in the midst of abundance.

If you don't see yourself as a winner, then you cannot perform as a winner.

Why did children seem to be so often spontaneous, joy-filled and concentrated while adults seemed controlled, anxiety-filled and diffused? It was the Goddam sense of having a self.

Deny Self for Self's sake

Escape the safety of the small by taking the risks to become part of something bigger. Your true self demands it. Listen for the timer on the oven to sound-that's when the memory curtain parts, flashing moments that really mattered.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.

The perfecting of one's self is the fundamental base of all progress and all moral development.

Each of us does, in effect, strike a series of deals or compromises between the wants and longings of the inner self, and an outer environment that offers certain possibilities and sets certain limitations.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

The spirit of brotherhood recognizes of necessity both the need of self-help and also the need of helping others in the only way which every ultimately does great god, that is, of helping them to help themselves

For tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today

You punch me, I punch back. I do not believe it's good for ones self-respect to be a punching bag.

There is no dependence that can be sure but a dependence upon one's self

Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.

If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.

The Beatles exist apart from my Self. I am not really Beatle George. Beatle George is like a suit or shirt that I once wore on occasion and until the end of my life people may see that shirt and mistake it for me.

Of all afflictions, the worst is self-contempt.

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.

What I dislike least in my former self are the moments of prayer.

Seriously, I do not think I fit for the presidency.

If your imagination leads you to understand how quickly people grant your requests when those requests appeal to their self- interest, you can have practically anything you go after.

Self-respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.

Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself.

It is the highest form of self-respect to admit our errors and mistakes and make amends for them. To make a mistake is only an error in judgment, but to adhere to it when it is discovered shows infirmity of character.

Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.

To understand the world one must not be worrying about one's self.

Whoever despises himself nonetheless respects himself as one who despises.

Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

True friendship is self-love at second-hand.

To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.

Arms in the hands of citizens may be used at individual discretion... in private self-defense.

The affair between Margot Asquinth and Margot Asquinth will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.

Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraint.

There is no self-delusion more fatal than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is groveling and sensual

Time is a cruel thief to rob us of our former selves. We lose as much to life as we do to death.

The difficulties, hardships and trials of life, the obstacles... are positive blessings. They knit the muscles more firmly, and teach self-reliance.

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought -a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others.

You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.

You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.

The sovereignty of one's self over one's self is called Liberty.

However long the night, the dawn will break.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think we become.

In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves... self-discipline with all of them came first.

All honor's wounds are self-inflicted.

Don?t back down just to keep the peace. Standing up for your beliefs builds self-confidence and self-esteem.

You cannot perform in a manner inconsistent with the way you see yourself.

Reality TV, blogging and self-publishing are all evidence of a society's or culture's desire to be more public. And that's a sign of a healthy or energetic culture.

He who thinks himself wise, O heavens! is a great fool.

Who has deceived thee as oft as thyself.

No sooner do we think we have assembled a comfortable life than we find a piece of ourselves that has no place to fit in.

In any culture, subculture, or family in which belief is valued above thought, and self-surrender is valued above self-expression, and conformity is valued above integrity, those who preserve their self-esteem are likely to be heroic exceptions.

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State, they arrive at their conclusions, largely inarticulate. Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none; but sometimes in a smoking room, one learns why things were done.

I am for those means which will give the greatest good to the greatest number.

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

True greatness consists in the use of a powerful understanding to enlighten oneself and others.

Self love is the instrument of our preservation.

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.

Many people are shy when it comes to getting out on a dance floor. Dancing is an activity that... reveals your inner self, whether you like it, or know it, or not. It is hard to fake it on a dance floor.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.

Don't listen to friends when the Friend inside you says "Do this."

Patience means self-suffering.

You must have an alibi to show why you lost. If you haven't one, you must fake one. You self confidence must be maintained.

She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely

Self conquest is the greatest of victories.

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that you really must make the self

I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.

The torment of precautions often exceeds the dangers to be avoided. It is sometimes better to abandon one's self to destiny.

Self-confidence is either a petty pride in our own narrowness, or the realization of our duty and privilege as God's children.

What a man can be, he must be. This need we call self-actualizat ion.

Self-interest is the enemy of all true affection.

Great acting can be almost a psychotic mix of self-consciousness and unself-consciousness. And thats the terrible conflict. You have to be free to jump off into that volcano and you have to be pathologically self-conscious.

The burden of the self is lightened with I laugh at myself.

As I get older ... I become more convinced that good government is not a substitute for self-government.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

Experience, as a desire for experience, does not come off. We must not study ourselves while having an experience.

The more you let yourself go, the less others let you go.

It's not what's happening to you now or what has happened in your past that determines who you become. Rather, it's your decisions about what to focus on, what things mean to you, and what you're going to do about them that will determine your ultimate destiny.

Whoever knows he is deep tries to be clear, but whoever wants to seem deep to the crowd tries to be obscure. For the crowd supposes that anything it cannot see to the bottom must be deep: it is so timid and goes so unwillingly into the water.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

Under peaceful conditions a warlike man sets upon himself.

Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem.

What would it be like to communicate from a part of your own self that is absolutely free from self-consciousness, that is fearless, uncorrupted, and passionately interested in the truth?.

Being Lutheran, Mother believed that self-pity is a deadly sin and so is nostalgia, and she had no time for either

Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.

Make yourself necessary to somebody.

Where there are no tigers, a wildcat is very self-important

I was brought up among the sort of self-important women who had a husband as one has an alibi.

We all self-conscious. I'm just the first to admit it.

The hopes of the Republic cannot forever tolerate either undeserved poverty or self-serving wealth.

When I am getting ready to reason with a man, I spend one-third of my time thinking about myself and what I am going to say and two-thirds about him and what he is going to say.

Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.

The next best thing to being witty one's self, is to be able to be able to quote another's wit.

...and there I suddenly found my articulate self in a dazzling land of smiling, jostling people wearing and not wearing all sorts of costumes and doing all sorts of clever things. And that's when I knew! What other life could there be but that of an actor?

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.