Quotes about self

page 10

“There you have it: our lives in a nutshell. Emphasis on.
But if the above whipped your mind into a frenzy, here's something even more interesting: Fang started a blog. Not that he's self-absorbed or trendy or anything. Nope, not him.”

“She couldn’t very well let him join her in bed like that.
Sure you could.
No I can’t.
Please?
Hush, self, let me think.’ (Grace)”

“But to mean it when I say that I want my life to count for His glory is to drive a stake through the heart of self - a painful and determined dying to me that must be a part of every day I live.”

“Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.”

“Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.”

“The Lord's way builds individual self esteem and develops and heals the dignity of the individual, whereas the world's way depresses the individual's view of himself and causes deep resentment”

“Perfectionism is self-abuse of the highest order.”

“Note to self: Rachel Morgan is a totally awesome liar.”

“Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.”

“Men are selfish and don't think about anything else but them self." pg. 45”

“It turns out that one can perpetrate all manner of heinous villainy under a cloak of courtesy and good cheer… a man will forfeit all sensible self-interest if he finds you affable enough to share your company over a flagon of ale.”

“Self-evident, adj. Evident to one's self and to nobody else.”

“I thought about all the people I knew who spent many of their waking hours feeling sorry for themselves. How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity. Just a few tearful minutes, then on with the day.”

“That’s pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our attention. Jacking off. Denial.”

“Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your
old self rejects you, and shuts you out. ~Lilly Bart”

“It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.”

“To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self…. And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.”

“When you're at peace with yourself and love your self, it is virtually impossible to do things to yourself that are destructive.”

“In the dark, with the windows lit and the rows of books glittering, the library is a closed space, a universe of self-serving rules that pretend to replace or translate those of the shapeless universe beyond.”

“In self-defense and in defense of the innocent, cowardice is the only sin.”

“My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.”

“I don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.”

“And I realized that I’d tolerated him this long because of self-doubt.”

“Of course to adhere to standards, to idealism, to vision in the face of immediate dangers takes great courage and takes self-confidence. But we also know that only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly.”

“I know that love is about power, too. Who gives, who takes. Who is willing to risk showing their true self.”

“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.”

“The warrior's nobility is like a prostitute's smile, the truth of which is self-interest.”

“Look at self-satisfied pop singers or greasy, semi-literate athletes. People worship them. Why?”

"Because they’re talented.”

“A good way to rid one's self of a sense of discomfort is to do something. That uneasy, dissatisfied feeling is actual force vibrating out of order; it may be turned to practical account by giving proper expression to its creative character.”

“My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression.”

“Men think that self-sacrifice is the most charming of all the cardinal virtues for women, and in order to keep it in healthy working order, they make opportunities for its illustration as often as possible. I would fain teach women that self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.”

“I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's-self is”

“She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.”

“When you're surrounded by stupidity, self-preservation isn't a sin.”

“But my dreaming self refuses to be consoled. It continues to wander, aimless, homeless, alone. It cannot be convinced of its safety by any evidence drawn from my waking life.”

“What we don't let out traps us. We think, "No one else feels this way, I must be crazy." So we don't say anything. And we become enveloped by a deep loneliness, not knowing where our feelings come from or what to do with them. "Why do I feel this way? Last week, I was on top of the world and now my feelings don't make sense." Voicing it, getting it out and letting it other people hear it, helps to dissipate it. The fears and self-criticisms begin to leak. And we begin to heal.”

“I'm not a very nostalgic person. I don't really look at the past and summon up regrets, or self-congratulations, it just is not a mechanism that operates very strongly in me. So I neither have regrets nor occasions for self-congratulations.”

“I normally can't stand vice-free people. They conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority. Plus they suck the life right out of a party.”

“LOVE of others is the appreciation of one's self.

MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.”

“Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.”

“Boys! Are they always this impossible? Do they always say cryptic, indecipherable things? (Note
to self: work with Liz to adapt her boy-to-English translator into a more mobile form—like maybe a
watch or necklace.)”

“I read in self-defense.”

“We all of us need to be toppled off the throne of self, my dear," he said. "Perched up there the tears of others are never upon our own cheek.”

“Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.”

“Happiness lies within one's self, and the way to dig it out is cocaine.”

“You will be at your best forever, Even now you have good moments. Occasional glimpses of your heavenly self. When you change your baby's diaper, forgive your boss's temper, tolerate your spouse's moodiness, you display traces of saintliness.”

“Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched".”

“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”

“The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.”

“We improve ourselves by victory over our self. There must be contests, and you must win.”

“Patriotism… is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.”

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

“You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way".”

“Never be ruled by possessions, and never, ever make wealth more important to you than your self-respect and your dignity." - Lady Taylor”

“Self-respect — The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.”

“All novels… are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?”

“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.”

“What a fool you must be," said my head to my heart, or my sterner to my softer self.”

“Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.”

“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.”

“Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.”

“There are many ways a self-respecting (not to mention sane) teenage girl might react to having a teenage boy suddenly in her bedroom in the middle of the night.
Hit.
Panic.
Flail.
Freeze.”

“The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.”

“[D]on’t cling to your self-righteous suffering, let it go…. Nothing is too good to be true, let yourself be forgiven. To the degree you insist that you must suffer, you insist on the suffering of others as well. (90)”

“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.”

“Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept.”

“This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.”

“The egocentric is always frustrated, simply because the condition of self-perfection is self-surrender. There must be a willingness to die to the lower part of self, before there can be a birth to the nobler.”

“There's no room for demons when you're self-possessed.”

“… one of the worst things about being a parent, for me, is the self-discovery, the being face to face with one's secret insanity and brokenness and rage.”

“When a woman conceives her true self, a miracle occurs and life around her begins again.”

“The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy…. Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.”

“Note to self: It's hard to attain a state of no-mind when you're incredibly pumped up on tea and sugar and have to urinate every three and a half minutes.”

“life's endless war against the self you cannot live without.”

“Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't "try" to do things. You simply "must" do things.”

“The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen”

“Loneliness is caused by an alienation from life. It is a loneliness from your real self.”

“There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.”

“It was only the matter of a new voice. Nobody listened to an old voice anymore. Old voices became a part of one's self, like a fingernail.”

“Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friend calls it.”

“the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love.”

“The ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language.”

“I am self-educated from genre books.”

“Perfectionism is a self destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.”

“No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence.”

“The frightened individual seeks for somebody or something to tie his self
to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer,
and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden:
the self.”

“I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal.”

“self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.”

“I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”

“People around the world are confusing the therapeutic value of self-expression with permission to manipulate others with their wounds.”

“Life works on strange laws of nature (Karma).
One never knows when a friend turns enemy & vice-versa.
Rely on your Self; self-reliance”

“The mind self-edits. The mind airbrushes. It's a different thing to be inside a body than outside. From outside, you can look, inspect, compare. From inside there is no comparison.”

“There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.”

“If you wish to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and career life, you must become a worthwhile person in your own self-development.”

“Thus, when you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are.”

“Sometimes the best offense was avoiding self-destruction.”

“One is happy as a result of one's own efforts, once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness — simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and, above all, a clear conscience.”

“There's a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours - days, if I have to.”

“Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You're so sure you'll do everything wrong you're afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than "laziness," is the real reason you find it hard to get started. This gumption trap of anxiety, which results from over-motivation, can lead to all kinds of errors of excessive fussiness. You fix things that don't need fixing, and chase after imaginary ailments. You jump to wild conclusions and build all kinds of errors into the machine because of your own nervousness. These errors, when made, tend to confirm your original underestimation of yourself. This leads to more errors, which lead to more underestimation, in a self-stoking cycle. The best way to break this cycle, I think, is to work out your anxieties on paper. Read every book and magazine you can on the subject. Your anxiety makes this easy and the more you read the more you calm down.”