Quotes about self

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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”

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

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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?”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The never-ending task of self improvement.”

“In a culture where profit has become the true God, self-sacrifice can seem incomprehensible rather than noble.”

“If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one’s own universe, to live on one’s own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil.”

“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.”

“People are never able to outperform their self-image.”

“I am charging you with the protection of my mother and friends, not to mention keeping my younger self off the Internet. He is as dangerous as Opal.”

“He would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that he despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.”

“I suddenly realized. The zebra. It is not something outside of us. The zebra is something inside of us. Our fears. Our own self-destructive nature. The zebra is the worst part of us when we are face-to-face with our worst times. The demon is us!”

“Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.”

“When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.”

“He took pains to avoid self-depreciation, self-mockery, ambiguity, irony, subtlety, vulnerability, a civilized world-weariness and a tragic sense of history--the very things, he says, that are most natural to him.”

“Wizard's Tenth Rule
Willfully turning aside from the truth is treason to one's self.”

“The self-prepared dinner is a great time killer for lonely people and as much time should be spent on it as possible.”

“You got nothin' to lose but your self-respect.”

“The primitive in each of us climbs closer to the surface during the night, for the moon sings to it, and the cold void between the stars speaks its language. To that savage self, evil can look lovely in too little light.”

“Beware
At war
Or at peace,
More people die
Of unenlightened self-interest
Than of any other disease”

“The trick… is to find the balance between the bright colors of humor and the serious issues of identity, self-loathing, and the possibility for intimacy and love when it seems no longer possible or, sadder yet, no longer necessary.”

“She wondered why they didn't understand that their true selfs were good enough, and if they weren't, then the someones they weren't good enough for, were really the ones not good enough.”

“When we don’t put the brakes on our self-absorption, we have nothing stopping us from total self-destruction. We become the fruits of our actions.”

“There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”

“The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen" -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.”

“A Mother who radiates self-love and self-acceptance actually VACCINATES her daughter against low self-esteem.”

“Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that's why it survives."

[, Newsweek Magazine, March 25, 2010]”

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.”

“your handwriting. the way you walk. which china pattern you choose. it's all giving you away. everything you do shows your hand. everything is a self portrait. everything is a diary.”

“Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.”

“How can there be self-help groups?”

“Desire consumes you, it takes you over. You forget yourself completely. All you can think about is the other, the one you desire, your self is just a fire.”

“Maybe self-improvement isn't the answer, maybe self-destruction is the answer.”

“Phoebe Marks was a person who never lost her individuality. Silent and self-contained, she seemed to hold herself within herself, and take no colour from the outer world.”

“My self is all to me. I don't have any need of you.”

“How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.”

“Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one another. And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.”

“A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed cormulas about good and evil.”

“I suppose it’s comfort, perhaps a sense of self-control, doing worse things to yourself than the world will ever dare inflict.”

“But victimhood was seductive, a release from responsibility and caring. Fear would be transmuted into weary resignation; failure would no longer generate guilt but, instead, would spawn a comforting self-pity.”

“That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.”

“A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.”

“I self-paralyze myself & wonder what I've got in my head.”

“Study nothing except in the knowledge that you already knew it. Worship nothing except in adoration of your true self. And fear nothing except in the certainty that you are your enemy's begetter and its only hope of healing.”

“This has to be the most self-centered thing I've ever said, but no, I think you just wanted to vex me.”

“Fuckin' A… hope didn't so much spring eternal as it drowned out common sense and self-preservation.”

“Only make decisions that support your self-image, self-esteem, and self-worth.”

“People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.”

“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.”

“It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender.”

“You have friends who actually care about you and speak the language of the inner self. You have avoided them of late. Your soul is as disheveled as your apartment, and until you can clean it up a little you don't want to invite anyone inside.”

“The sorrow of God lies in our fear of Him, our fear of life, and our fear of ourselves. He anguishes over our self-absorption and self-sufficiency… God's sorrow lies in our refusal to approach Him when we sinned and failed.”

“Self-consciousness, that's what it is. Always my abiding vice. I keep seeing myself. Me watching myself watching others watch me. How do you lose that? What's the trick?”

“Embrace each challenge in your life as an opportunity for self-transformation.”

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.”

“I know," he said, looking down at himself self-consciously. "I am not-I mean, I look-"
"Beautiful," she said, and she meant it. "You look beautiful, James Carstairs.”

“If we experience any failures or setbacks, we do not forget them because they offend our self-esteem. Instead we reflect on them deeply, trying to figure out what went wrong and discern whether there are any patterns to our mistakes.”

“To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die.”

“Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.”

“Destiny, I feel, is also a relationship - a play between divine grace and willful self-effort.”

“Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.”