Quotes about self

page 12

“So, using his pride like a shield against despair, dejection, and-most important—
self-pity, Raoden raised his head to stare damnation in the eyes.”

“What was the self-sacrifice?"
I jettisoned half of a much-loved and I think irreplaceable pair of shoes."
Why was that self-sacrifice?"
Because they were mine!" said Ford, crossly.
I think we have different value systems."
Well mine's better.”

“The truth is that creative activity is one that involves the entire self - our emotions, our levels of energy, our characters, and our minds.”

“Culture is shared meaning. Suppose we were able to share meanings freely without a compulsive urge to impose our view or conform to those of others and without distortion and self-deception. Would this not constitute a real revolution in culture.”

“There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.”

“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.”

“Self-preservation isn't worth it if you can't live with the self you're preserving”

“Now we're in that sweet period where everyone agrees that our recent horrors should never be repeated. But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.”

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

“Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.”

“Knock your bad self out.”

“Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything good in the world.”

“Twas the night before Thanksgiving.
All the food's in the oven.
And I'm in the bedroom performin' self lovin'.”

“Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?”

“More gold had been mined from the mind of men than the earth it self”

“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.”

“Aloneness and selfness are too important to betray for company.”

“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.”

“The greatest tales, well told, awaken the fears and longings of the listeners. Each man hears a different story. Each is touched by it according to his inner self. The words go to the ear, but the true message travels straight to the spirit.”

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

“Your self esteem is like a notch below Kafka's.”

“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am -- not stuck in the middle, but hovering above the entire farcical spectrum, weeping as I behold my fellow man's devotion to political illusion and self-destruction.”

“For the few little successes I may seem to have, there are acres of misgivings and self-doubt.”

“Listen up—there’s no war that will end all wars,’ Crow tells me. ‘War breeds war. Lapping up the blood shed by violence, feeding on wounded flesh. War is a perfect, self-contained being. You need to know that.”

“Lose the pessimism, Ms. Lane. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“A lie twice believed is self decieved”

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

“When he sat alone in the darkness and cried and was done, all done with it, nothing had changed. His leg still hurt, it was still dark, he was still alone and the self-pity had accomplished nothing.”

“The underlying point held; experience as well as common sense indicated that the most reliable method of avoiding self-extinction was not to equip oneself with the means to accomplish it in the first place.”

“But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.”

“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.”

“Remember, there is nothing wrong with a healthy sense of self-respect.”

“A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.”

“The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities”

“When you were the son of evil, there was little you couldn't do, own, or kill, and yet her mortal self was an elusive trophy he could touch, but not put on his shelf.

This made her rare. This made her precious.

This made him… love her.”

“Genuine self-acceptance is not derived from the power of positive thinking, mind games or pop psychology. IT IS AN ACT OF FAITH in the God of grace.”

“God, is this all it is, the ricocheting down the corridor of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgust?”

“Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.”

“A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.”

“With the knowledge of her aloneness came a rush of self-declaration: I will not be nothing.”

“There is joy in self-forgetfulness. So I try to make the light in others' eyes my sun, the music in others' ears my symphony, the smile on others' lips my happiness.”

“Finding your passion isn't just about careers and money. It's about finding your authentic self. The one you've buried beneath other people's needs.”

“Can you imagine, finally showing your true self to your spouse, your soul mate, and having him not like you? So that's how the hating first began. I've thought about this a lot, and that's where it started, I think.”

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

“The grandiose person is never really free; first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.”

“In order to deal with reality successfully - to pursue and achieve the values which his life requires - man needs self-esteem; he needs to be confident of his efficacy and worth.”

“Self-consciousness kills communication.”

“You’re a human, you should understand self-obsession.”

“The deeper the Self-realization of a man, the more he influences the whole universe by his subtle spiritual vibrations, and the less he himself is affected by the phenomenal flux.”

“No one is born fully-formed: it is through self-experience in the world that we become what we are.”

“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.”

“The Writer's Oath

I promise solemnly:

1. to write as often and as much as I can,

2. to respect my writing self, and

3. to nurture the writing of others.

I accept these responsibilities and shall honor them always.”

“I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”

“Self improvement is masturbation…”

“Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being.”

“The mask was a thing on it's own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-conciousness.”

“I just thought to my self, all of a sudden, that we had something in common. A natural chemistry, if you will. And I had a feeling that something big was going to happen. To both of us. That we were, in fact, meant to be together.”

“Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.”

“According to Dickens, the first rule of human nature is self-preservation and when I forgive him for writing a character as pathetic as Oliver Twist, I'll thank him for the advice.”

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

“It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.”

“Give a man or woman back his self-respect, and in most cases-not all, but most-you also give back that person's ability to think with at least some clarity.”

“When we really want to go for something better, we shall smash the old. Until then, any sort of proposal, or making proposals, is no more than a tiresome game for self-important people.”

“Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.”

“What is the most important thing one learns in school? Self-esteem, support, and friendship.”

“Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”

“I don't like self-righteous people," I say.

"What's to like?" says Haymitch, who begins sucking the dregs out of the empty bottles.”

“Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.”

“The self is coming from a state of pure awareness from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in a outward manifesation of the physical world, including fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions”

“After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.”

“Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.”

“Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.”

“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.”

“It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master”

“Life isn’t like the movies. People don’t change overnight. people don’t go from arrogant and self-righteous to ashamed and remorseful. They don’t suddenly give in when they’ve spent years taking out. No doesn’t magically become a Yes.”

“And then more quiet, silence so deep it almost drowned out the roar of the night music that pounded away in my secret self.”

“That is the challenge Companion. To take what has happened to you and learn from it. Nothing is quite so destructive as pity, especially self-pity. No event in life is so terrible that one cannot rise above it.”

“It is through the alignment of the body that I discovered the alignment of my mind, self, and intelligence.”

“I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.”

“Zaphod Beeblebrox, adventurer, ex-hippie, good-timer (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terribly bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch.”

“Every man finds his limitations, Mr. Holmes, but at least it cures us of the weakness of self-satisfaction.”

“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.”

“From time to time, I do consider that I might be mad. Like any self-respecting lunatic, however, I am always quick to dismiss any doubts about my sanity.”

“This was one princess who could rescue her own damn self.”

“It's essential you create a fiery will from within--harness that power of decisiveness--and choose to be your strongest self.”

“Butterflies are self propelled flowers.”

“The self-assured believer is a greater sinner in the eyes of God than the troubled disbeliever.”

“It's human; we all put self interest first.”

“Try not to sing too many sad songs for yourself. The universe already hates you. Self-pity isn't going to help.”

“I wanted to wipe the grin off his face with a fist. I resisted the urge. Who says I have no self-control?”

“She was just a shell of her former self, functioning and talking but hardly alive.”

“Tell Hugh," she whispered.
Tell Hugh your freaking self! He's right here! And you're not going anywhere.”

“Are you sure self-pity is a luxury you can afford, Jack?”

“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.”

“Self-possession depends on its environment.”

“Note to self-give serious thought to becoming an alcoholic.”

“if a book isn't self-explanatory, then it isn't worth reading.”

“This was her life. Not the life she had once dreamed of, not a life her younger self would ever have imagined or desired, but the life she was living, with all its complexities. This was her life, built with care and attention, and it was good.”

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.”