Quotes about self
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“No one had ever said such things to her before. People were intimidated by her self-possession and no-nonsense demeanor. No man would ever dream of calling her adorable, sweet, darling… and certainly no one had ever made herthat way.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Suddenly You

People, Dreams, Way

“What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Source: Adam Bede

Fate

“It is a wretched thing that the young men of today are so contriving and so proud of their material posessions. Men with contriving hearts are lacking in duty. Lacking in duty, they will have no self-respect.”

Tsunetomo Yamamoto book Hagakure

Source: Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai

Men, Heart

“All the suffering there is in this world arises from wishing our self to be happy. All the happiness there is in this world arises from wishing others to be happy.”

Šantidéva (685–763) 8th-century Indian Buddhist monk and scholar

Happiness, World, Suffering

“There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

People

“What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The House of the Seven Gables

Source: The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Ch. XI : The Arched Window

Heart

“Political activism is seductive because it seems to offer the possibility that one can improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one's perceptions and transforming one's self.”

Tom Robbins book Still Life with Woodpecker

Source: Still Life with Woodpecker

Personality

“I still haven't found the place where I can be my true self. But maybe you never get to be your true self, either.”

Karen Joy Fowler book We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Source: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“I lock my door upon myself,
And bar them out; but who shall wall
Self from myself, most loathed of all?”

Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) English poet

Source: Complete Poems

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

Gloria Steinem (1934) American feminist and journalist

“Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain - and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.”

Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People

Part 1 : Fundamental Techniques in Handling People, p. 36.
Source: How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)
Context: Benjamin Franklin, tactless in his youth, became so diplomatic, so adroit at handling people that he was made American Ambassador to France. The secret of his success? "I will speak ill of no man," he said, "... and speak all the good I know of everybody." Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain - and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving. "A great man shows his greatness," says Carlyle, "by the way he treats little men."

Fools, Forgiveness, Understanding

“How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.”

Iris Murdoch book The Sea, the Sea

Source: The Sea, the Sea

Death, Country

“It is less mortifying to believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.”

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) American novelist, short story writer, designer

Indifference

“I wasn’t lonely. I experienced no self-pity. I was just caught up in a life in which I could ﬁnd no meaning.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Life

“There is no such thing as an evil genius, as evil in it's self is stupidity.”

David Farland (1957) American writer

Source: The Wizard of Ooze

Stupidity, Evil

“I don't go in for being sorry for people. For one thing it's insulting. One is only sorry for people if they are sorry for themselves. Self-pity is the biggest stumbling block in our world today.

~Jessop”

Agatha Christie book Destination Unknown

Source: Destination Unknown

People, World

“Self-destruction would be a brief, almost autoerotic free-fall into a great velvet darkness.”

Mark Mirabello (1955) American writer

Source: The Cannibal Within

“It's not a problem. There are people out there with much worse problems than mine."-Cynthia
"Doesn't make yours any more fun to bear."-Liza
"No. But it does help with the self-pity."- Cynthia”

Jennifer Crusie book Bet Me

Source: Bet Me

People, Problem, Help

“To subdue one's self to one's own ends might be dangerous, but to subdue one's self to other people's ends was dust and ashes. Yet there were those, still more unhappy, who envied even the ashy saltness of those dead sea apples.”

Dorothy L. Sayers book Gaudy Night

Source: Gaudy Night

People, Envy, Sea, Dead

“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.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Dreams

“When life descends into the pit
I must become my own candle
Willingly burning my self
To light up the darkness around me.”

Alice Walker (1944) American author and activist

Life, Light

“Chasing after a guy who’s not interested in you will rip the hell out of your self-respect. Better to face facts now because the longer you put it off, the harder it’ll be.”

Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1948) American writer

Source: Call Me Irresistible

Guy, Hell

“Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd
In one self place; but where we are is hell,
And where hell is, there must we ever be.”

Christopher Marlowe The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

Mephistopheles, Act II, scene i, line 118
Doctor Faustus (c. 1603)
Source: Dr. Faustus

Hell

“A vital part of the happiness formula is self-discipline. Whoever conquers himself knows deep happiness that fills the heart with joy.”

Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) American writer

Happiness, Heart, Joy, Parting

“Always guarding one's real, precious self in a cocoon of tranquility within a thousand masks.
Life itself had become a secret affair.”

Mary Balogh (1944) Welsh-Canadian novelist

Source: A Secret Affair

Life, Secret

“Don't look now, but that's my ex over there."
Surely I'm not the only one who takes "don't look now" as "there's no better time than now." I looked.
"Bad, Ali!" Another slap to my arm. "Bad, bad, bad Ali! Have you no self control?”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: Alice in Zombieland

Time

“They attacked you? (Danger)
No, I beat my own self up. What do you think? (Keller)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Sins of the Night

Thinking

“I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.”

John Steinbeck book Travels with Charley: In Search of America

Source: Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“The phenomenon of war is its hermaphroditism: the principles of victory and of defeat inhabit the same body and the necessary opponent, enemy, is merely the bed they self-exhaust each other on.”

William Faulkner book A Fable

Source: A Fable

War, Victory

“What the hell is this?” Desandra asked
“This is Cuddles. She's a mammoth donkey.”
Derek grinned, leaning on the fence. “Do you have any self-respect left?”
“Nope.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Breaks

Hell

“Forget the self and you will fear nothing, in whatever level or awareness you find yourself to be.”

Carlos Castaneda (1925–1998) Peruvian-American author

Source: The Active Side of Infinity

Fear, Forgetting

“It’s in the act of having to do things that you don’t want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Learning, Past, Moving On

“Popcorn for breakfast! Why not? It's a grain. It's like, like, grits, but with high self-esteem.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Angel Experiment

“I don't care how much you eat, Ender, self-cannibalism won't get you out of this school.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

School

“One can only walk so far from one's true self before the bond either snaps, or pulls one back.”

Robin Hobb book Royal Assassin

Source: Royal Assassin

“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.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

Pleasure, Feeling, Change, Childhood

“Note to self: If you’re trying not to have kids, don’t marry a lady who is the Titan of motherhood.”

Rick Riordan (1964) American writer

Source: Percy Jackson's Greek Gods

“The Book had in a high degree excited us to self-activity, which is the best effect of any book.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

Bk. I, ch. 4.
1830s, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)

Books

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Life, Way, Imagination

“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.”

Nathaniel Branden (1930–2014) Canadian–American psychotherapist and writer

Source: Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

Sense, Strong

“I give myself a good cry if I need it. But then I concentrate on the good things still in my life. I don't allow myself any more self-pity than that. A little each every morning, a few tears, and that's all.”

Mitch Albom Tuesdays with Morrie

Source: Tuesdays with Morrie

Life, Tear, Cry

“I'd take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.”

Ken Kesey book One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Source: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), Ch. 17
Context: Later, hiding in the latrine from the black boys, I'd take a look at my own self in the mirror and wonder how it was possible that anybody could manage such an enormous thing as being what he was.

“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.”

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) American novelist, short story writer, designer

Life, Soul, Personality, Friendship