Quotes about self
page 31

“From his entrance, in medias rape, Vytas Juozapaitis had a compelling presence as both seductive and dangerous Don Juan. He had a dash, swagger, a sense of humour, and a strong, lustrous voice. He's a good actor too. You believed both in the way he was driven by his carnality and in his self possession. In short, he embodied the music.”

Vytautas Juozapaitis (1963) Lithuanian opera singer

Lloyd Schwartz, "Teatro Lirico's fire breathing Don Giovanni". Boston Phoenix (October, 2003)

Music, Way, Sense, Strong

“Nothing is so self-sabotaging as having your actions not reflect your goals. Your life is always just waiting for permission to go where you want it to go … to be shaped how you want it to be shaped.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 38

Life, Waiting

“At 15 years of age, I was 6’3” tall, with a very low voice that brought attention to me - often. As a result, I was very self- conscious, to say the least. My mother took me to a dramatic coach in Hollywood to help me overcome my self-consciousness. On the very first meeting, she gave a magazine to me to read out-loud for 15 minutes, while standing on a raised platform. Afterward the coach, Ruth Bowes, turned to my mother and said, “Your son has every quality to become a great actor.””

Rex Reason (1928–2015) American actor

Age, Reading, Help

“What are those lessons? Instead of building more single-family dwellings, we should build multigenerational, multifamily homes in vibrant eco-villages that share facilities, tools, labor and resources. Instead of designing cities for self-driving, single-person cars, design them for walking, biking, and public transportation with lots of places for people to meet and greet, mix and mingle. Instead of growing an economy dependent on global movements of money, people, and goods to maximize profit uncoupled from place, create economies that bring people together to maximize health and well-being in the place where they live.”

David Korten (1937) writer, sustainability advocate

How the Economy Affects Our Mental Health, September 18, 2018 https://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/when-profit-drives-us-community-suffers-20180918

Money, People, Health, Family

“There is not and cannot possibly be any hard and fast antithesis between self-interest and care for others, for man is a social creature, born into family, clan, community, nation, brought up in mutual dependence. The founders of our religion made this a cornerstone of morality. The admonition: love they neighbour as thyself, and do as you would be done by, expresses this. You will note that it does not denigrate self, or elevate love of others above it. On the contrary, it sees concern for self and responsibility for self as something to be expected, and asks only that this be extended to others. This embodies the great truth that self-regard is the root of regard for one's fellows.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Greater London Young Conservatives (Iain Macleod Memorial Lecture - "Dimensions of Conservatism") (4 July 1977) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103411 Leader of the Opposition

Love, Truth, Family, Religion

“Although the Mathematicks according to its Etymology, signifies only Discipline, yet it merits the Name of Science better than any other, because its Principles are self-evident, and independent on any sensible Experience, and its Propositions demonstrated beyond all possible Doubt or Opposition. Youth were anciently instructed herein before Philosophy, on which Account Aristotle called it the Science of Children. This was taught them not only to raise and excite their Genius, but also as a fit preparative to the Study of Nature; and it was upon this Account that the Divine Plato inscribed on his School… that none wholly ignorant of Geometry should be admitted there.”

Jacques Ozanam (1640–1718) French mathematician

Source: A Mathematical Dictionary: Or; A Compendious Explication of All Mathematical Terms, 1702, p. 1, The Introduction; Lead paragraph

Children, Youth, School, Nature

“Still falls the Rain —
Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man's wounded Side:
He bears in His Heart all wounds, — those of the light that died,
The last faint spark
In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark…”

Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) British poet

Still Falls the Rain (1940)

Sadness, Light, Heart

“An unattended mind is the breeding ground of self defeat.”

Guy Finley (1949) American self-help writer, philosopher, and spiritual teacher, and former professional songwriter and musician

The Lost Secrets of Prayer

“The little I knew about my own self wouldn’t have filled a thimble!”

Alice Walker book The Color Purple

The Color Purple (1982)

“Frank sincerity is a quality much extolled among men and pleasing to every one, while simulation, on the contrary, is detested and condemned. Yet for a man's self, simulation is of the two by far the more useful; sincerity tending rather to the interest of others. But since it cannot be denied that it is not a fine thing to deceive, I would commend him whose conduct is as a rule open and straightforward, and who uses simulation only in matters of the gravest importance and such as very seldom occur; for in this way he will gain a name for honesty and sincerity, and with it the advantages attaching to these qualities. At the same time, when, in any extreme emergency, he resorts to simulation, he will draw all the greater advantage from it, because from his reputation for plain dealing his artifice will blind men more.”

Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) Italian writer, historian and politician

Number 104.
Counsels and Reflections (1857)

Men, Way, Time, Drawing

“The behavioral foundations of capitalism do, of course, continue to engage attention, and the pursuit of self-interest still occupies a central position in theories about the workings and successes of capitalism. But in these recent theories, interests are given a rather different—and much more "positive"—role in promoting efficient allocation of resources through informational economy as well as the smooth working of incentives, rather than the negative role of blocking harmful passions.”

Amartya Sen (1933) Indian economist

1990s, Foreword to The Passions and the Interests (1996)

Behavior, Passion, Success

“The outlaw uses the knife to separate the persona from the self. The outlaw uses the warrior’s sword to cut through his own character armor to destroy the defense mechanisms that have kept him imprisoned within the citadel of personality and role.”

Sam Keen (1931) author, professor, and philosopher

Source: The Passionate Life (1983), p. 132

Personality

“And so I say to you today, my friends, that you may be able to speak with the tongues of men and angels; you may have the eloquence of articulate speech; but if you have not love, it means nothing. Yes, you may have the gift of prophecy; you may have the gift of scientific prediction and understand the behavior of molecules; you may break into the storehouse of nature and bring forth many new insights; yes, you may ascend to the heights of academic achievement so that you have all knowledge; and you may boast of your great institutions of learning and the boundless extent of your degrees; but if you have not love, all of these mean absolutely nothing. You may even give your goods to feed the poor; you may bestow great gifts to charity; and you may tower high in philanthropy; but if you have not love, your charity means nothing. You may even give your body to be burned and die the death of a martyr, and your spilt blood may be a symbol of honor for generations yet unborn, and thousands may praise you as one of history's greatest heroes; but if you have not love, your blood was spilt in vain. What I'm trying to get you to see this morning is that a man may be self-centered in his self-denial and self-righteous in his self-sacrifice. His generosity may feed his ego, and his piety may feed his pride. So without love, benevolence becomes egotism, and martyrdom becomes spiritual pride.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967)

Love, Death, Men, Angels

“The love of people goes far beyond liberty, rights, equality, and justice. It is something positive, seeks the fullest possible self-realization; it contemplates happiness, overflows all differences, and creates the kind of wealth that can be produced only by people who enjoy their common participation in a community.”

Elmer Eric Schattschneider (1892–1971) American political scientist

Source: Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government (1969), p. 43

Love, Happiness, People, Justice

“Sometimes I think these self-righteous labors are attempts to impress myself rather than sincere strides toward God.”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

God, Thinking, Sincerity

“BY primary groups I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face association and cooperation. They are primary in several senses, but chiefly in that they are fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the individual. The result of intimate association, psychologically, is a certain fusion of individualities in a common whole, so that one's very self, for many purposes at least, is the common life and purpose of the group. Perhaps the simplest way of describing this wholeness is by saying that it is a "we"; it involves the sort of sympathy and mutual identification for which "we" is the natural expression. One lives in the feeling of the whole and finds the chief aims of his will in that feeling.”

Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American sociologist

Source: Social Organization: a Study of the Larger Mind, 1909, p. 23 (1962)

Life, Way, Feeling, Nature

“My bargain with God included the undertaking that I should play no direct part, merely supervise mankind’s self-redemption. Like yourself, my agents are those whose independence of thought is already well-established.”

Michael Moorcock book The City in the Autumn Stars

Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 13 (p. 367; the speaker is Lucifer)

God, Parting

“There is perhaps no truer sign that a man is really advancing than that he is learning to forget himself, that he is losing the natural thoughts about self in the thought of One higher than himself, to whose guidance he can commit himself and all men.”

John Campbell Shairp (1819–1885) British writer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 565.

Men, Nature, Learning, Forgetting

“It is supposed that there has been progress in the science of textual criticism, and the most frivolous pretender has learned to talk superciliously about "the old unscientific days". The old unscientific days are everlasting; they are here and now; they are renewed perennially by the ear which takes formulas in, and the tongue which gives them out again, and the mind which meanwhile is empty of reflexion and stuffed with self-complacency.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

"The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism", a lecture delivered on August 4, 1921

Learning, Science

“If we are to put interrogators to work in defence of liberal values, their role in the community must receive proper recognition. They will require intensive counselling to overcome the inevitable traumas that this difficult work involves. They must be enabled to see themselves as dedicated workers in the cause of progress. Psychotherapy must be available to help them avoid the negative self-image from which some torturers have suffered in the past.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

A Modest Proposal (2003)

Communication, Suffering, Past, Help

“Reputation runs in a vicious circle, and Merit limps behind it, mortified and abashed at its own insignificance. It has been said that the test of fame or popularity is to consider the number of times your name is repeated by others … So, if you see the same name staring you in the face in great letters at the corner of every street, you involuntarily think the owner of it must be a great man to occupy so large a space in the eye of the town. The appeal is made, in the first instance, to the senses, but it sinks below the surface into the mind. There are various ways of playing one's-self off before the public, and keeping one's name alive. The newspapers, the lamp-posts, the walls of empty houses, the shutters of windows, the blank covers of magazines and reviews, are open to every one.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Patronage and Puffing" Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Way, Thinking, Sense, Time

“A conception of justice cannot be deduced from self evident premises or conditions on principles; instead, its justification is a matter of the mutual support of many considerations, of everything fitted together into one coherent view.”

John Rawls book A Theory of Justice

Source: A Theory of Justice (1971; 1975; 1999), Chapter I, Section 4, p. 21

Justice, Support

“Man is by nature a lover. Only he has yet to discover the real thing to love. This quest awakens him to the fulfillment of his real Self.”

Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) Indian writer and guru

The Wings of Joy (1997)

Love, Lovers, Nature

“Ladies, your self-worth is like your price tag. If he's not offering what your worth, he can't have you. No bargains, no sales.”

Keshia Chante (1988) Canadian actor and musician

Official Website (2009)

“Bobby noticed two colorful charts posted on the wall near the refrigerator. The first displayed each kid's grades and major test results since the start of the school year in September. The other was a list of household chores for which each child was responsible. … Some attributed Asian-Americans' success to a conspiracy, but Bobby saw the simple explanation for their achievements everywhere in the Phan house: They tried harder. They embraced the ideals upon which the country had been based — including hard work, honesty, goal-oriented self-denial, and the freedom to be whatever one wanted to be. Ironically, their great success was partly due to the fact that so many born Americans had become cynical about those same ideals.”

Dean Koontz book The Bad Place

Source: The Bad Place (1990), Chapter 32

School, Color, Freedom, Success

“It's like I can never watch myself on TV unless I have to do some editing before a show comes out. It's like hearing your voice back on a tape recorder and I'm sure you know how horrible that is. I always look for the worst things in myself - criticising my hair and stuff. I'm very self-conscious about it all.”

Nigella Lawson (1960) British food writer, journalist and broadcaster

As quoted in "Nigella Lawson" by James Ellis in Metro (4 September 2002)

“Imagine each family as a kind of little factory--a multiperson unit producing meals, health, skills, children, and self-esteem from market goods and the time, skills, and knowledge of its members. This is only one of the remarkable concepts explored by Gary Becker in his landmark work on the family. Becker applies economic theory to the most sensitive and fateful personal decisions, such as choosing a spouse or having children. He uses the basic economic assumptions of maximizing behavior, stable preferences, arid equilibria in explicit or implicit markets to analyze the allocation of time to child care as well as to careers, to marriage and divorce in polygynous as well as monogamous societies, to the increase and decrease of wealth from one generation to another.”

Gary S. Becker book A Treatise on the Family

Book abstract 2009
A Treatise on the Family, 1981

Fate, Marriage, Children, Health

“Lord Goschen tells you that France only takes 2 per cent. of its corn from abroad, that it is self-sufficient, and that Germany only takes 30 per cent., whereas, he says, we take four-fifths. That is not a comforting reflection…it is not a comforting reflection to think that we, a part of the British Empire that might be self-sufficient and self-contained, are, nevertheless, dependent, according to Lord Goschen, for four-fifths of our supplies upon foreign countries, any one of which, by shutting their doors upon us, might reduce us to a state of almost absolute starvation. … the working man has to fear the result of a shortage of supplies and of a consequent monopoly. If in time of war one of the great countries, Russia, Germany, France, or the United States of America, were to cut off its supply, it would infallibly raise the price according to the quantity which we received from that country. If there were no war, if in times of peace these countries wanted their corn for themselves, which they will do, or if there were bad harvests, which there may be in either of these cases, you will find the price of corn rising many times higher than any tax I have ever suggested. And there is only one remedy for it. There is only one remedy for a short supply. It is to increase your sources of supply. You must call in the new world, the Colonies, to redress the balance of the old. Call in the Colonies, and they will answer to your call with very little stimulus or encouragement. They will give you a supply which will be never failing and all sufficient.”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Speech in Newcastle (20 October 1903), quoted in The Times (21 October 1903), p. 10.
1900s

War, World, Fear, Peace

“In the network economy, success is self-reinforcing; it obeys the law of increasing returns. The great innovation of Silicon Valley is not the wowie-zowie hardware and software it has invented. Silicon Valley's greatest "product" is the social organisation of its companies, and most important, the tangled web of former jobs, intimate colleagues, information leakage from one firm to the next, rapid company life cycles, and agile e mail culture. This social web, suffused into the warm hardware of jelly bean chips and copper neurons, creates a network economy.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995), New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999)

Life, Law, Success

“It is possible, after all, to 'fake' the 'realest' possible 'evidence' of heterosexuality: man or woman, one can participate in heterosexual marriage and even help produce a brood of spawn and still 'turn out' to have been 'living a lie,' to have been 'really' gay or lesbian all along. Precisely because there is no final 'proof' of heterosexuality, heterosexuality must constantly set about trying to prove itself, assert itself, insist on itself. Indeed, as Butler argues, heterosexuality as hegemonic institution is finally nothing more than its own repetitive self-insistence, nothing other than 'a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations' (Bodies 125). Or, as Janet E. Halley puts it in regard to legalistic constructions of heterosexuality, normative heterosexuality 'is a highly unstable, default characterization for people who have not marked themselves or been marked by other as homosexual.”

Calvin Thomas (critical theorist) (1956) American academic

As Halley continues: 'The resulting class of heterosexuals is a default class, home to those who have not fallen out of it.'
Source: Straight with a Twist (2000), p. 28.

Marriage, People, Lie, Home

“Echoing the Christian faith in free will, humanists hold that human beings are – or may someday become – free to choose their lives. They forget that the self that does the choosing has not itself been chosen.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Beyond the Last Thought: Freud's cigars and the long way round to Nirvana (p. 86)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Faith, Forgetting

“The imagination … that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

"The Statesman's Manual" (1816)

Truth, Imagination, Birth, Sense

“What right do we have to claim, as some might, that human beings are the only inhabitants of our planet blessed with an actual ability to be "aware"? … The impression of a "conscious presence" is indeed very strong with me when I look at a dog or a cat or, especially, when an ape or monkey at the zoo looks at me. I do not ask that they are "self-aware" in any strong sense (though I would guess that an element of self-awareness can be present). All I ask is that they sometimes simply feel!”

Roger Penrose book The Emperor's New Mind

Source: The Emperor's New Mind (1989), Ch. 9, Real Brains and Model Brains, p. 383.

Dogs, Feeling, Cats, Sense

“In America, enslaved Africans learned the story of the exodus from Egypt and set their own hearts on a promised land of freedom. Enslaved Africans discovered a suffering savior and found he was more like themselves than their masters. Enslaved Africans heard the ringing promises of the Declaration of Independence and asked the self-evident question, 'Then why not me?' In the era of America's founding, a man named Olaudah Equiano was taken in bondage to the New World. He witnessed all of slavery's cruelties, the ruthless and the petty. He also saw beyond the slave-holding piety of a time to a higher standard of humanity.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2003, Hope and Conscience Will Not Be Silenced (July 2003)

World, Question, Freedom, Suffering

“…in the first place, self decapitation is an extremely difficult, not to say dangerous, thing to attempt; and, in the second, it’s suicide, and suicide is a capital offence.”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

The Mikado (1885)

Suicide

“I know a girl who just looks at her face in the medicine cabinet mirror and never looks below her shoulders, and she's four or five hundred pounds but she doesn't see all that, she just sees a beautiful face and therefore she thinks she's a beauty. And therefore, I think she's a beauty, too, because I usually accept people on the basis of their self-images, because their self-images have more to do with the way they think than their objective-images do.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

Source: 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), Ch. 4: Beauty

People, Beauty, Way, Girl

“Keen intelligence is two-edged, It may be used constructively or destructively like a knife, either to cut the boil of ignorance, or to decapitate one's self. Intelligence is rightly guided only after the mind has acknowledged the inescapability of spiritual law.”

Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936) Indian yogi and guru

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

Law, Intelligence

“While we call role models 'leaders', most 'leaders' are really followers. Most 'leaders' follow their bribes. And we are the people who offer the bribes. We in essence give men two bribes to risk their lives: pay and praise… A man who self-selects for a death profession expects his body to be used in exchange for pay. The unspoken motto of the death professions is 'My body, not my choice.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 40.

Death, Men, People

“Truth means the fulfilment of our self; and moral law means following the law of our being. Truth is the beginning and end (the substance) of material existence. Without truth there is no material existence. It is for this reason that the moral man values truth.
Truth is not only the fulfilment of our own being; it is that by which things outside of us have an existence. The fulfilment of our being is moral sense. The fulfilment of the nature of things outside of us is intellect. These, moral sense and intellect, are the powers or faculties of our being. They combine the inner or subjective and outer or objective use of the power of the mind. Therefore, with truth, everything done is right.”

Zisi (-481–-402 BC) Chinese philosopher

Source: The Doctrine of the Mean, p. 124

Truth, Law, Nature, Sense

“Geology has joined biology in lowering mankind's self-esteem. Geology suggests how mankind's existence is contingent upon the geological consent of the planet.”

George Will (1941) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author

from a review of Simon Winchester’s Krakatoa (2003), as quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations (rev. 2005), ed. Rawson & Miner, Oxford University Press, p. 600: ISBN 0195168232
2000s

“The de-eroticization of the world, a companion to its disenchantment … seems to result from a combination of causes—our democratic regime and its tendencies toward leveling and self-protection, a reductionist-materialist science that inevitably interprets eros as sex, and the atmosphere generated by “the death of God” and of the subordinate god, Eros.”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

Source: Love and Friendship (1993), p. 15.

Death, God, World, Sex

“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.”

Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) English poet

Fourth Century, sect. 55.
Centuries of Meditations

Love

“We have communion in Christ's sufferings as we die with Him unto self, and rise with Him to our proper life — the life of self- surrender to the will of God.”

Richard Fuller (minister) (1804–1876) United States Baptist minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 543.

Life, God, Suffering, Christ

“Turning to God, Truth, Reality, simply means to let go, even fearfully at first, of our self-centered ideas.”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

1500 Ways to Escape the Human Jungle

God, Truth, Idea, Reality

“Our young people who go off to war and who join the service, we need to honor them because they're willing to risk their lives to protect us, to defend us, so we can have this way of life. And the agreement that they make with us is that we never send them into harm's way unless it is absolutely necessary. I think most Americans — I just saw the latest poll today — 54% now believe that invading Iraq wasn't the wisest thing to do — it wasn't certainly in self-defense. You weren't threatened; I wasn't being threatened, and that's the only time, because ultimately if it was your child…would you give up your child to secure Fallujah?”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

On the television program Late Night with Conan O'Brien (25 June 2004)
2004

Life, War, People, Way

“I can imagine nothing more wonderful than always wanting to keep a man…It's this NOT wanting to keep them, and yet not quite being able to disentangle one's self, never quite having the ruthlessness to stike at the hands on the gunwale with an oar until they let go -- that's the horrible thing.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Letter to Dorothy Thompson (December 29, 1927).

Imagination

“Again and again, the altruist has arisen in politics, has bidden us share with others the product of our toil, and has proclaimed the communistic dogma as the panacea for our social ills. So today, amid the buried hopes and buried projects of the past, the doctrine of communism still lives in the minds of men. Under stress of misfortune, or in dread of tyranny, it is still preached in modern times as Plato preached it in the world of the Greeks.
Yet it is indeed doubtful whether, in the history of mankind, a doctrine was ever taught more impracticable or more false to the principles it professes than this very doctrine of communism. In a world where self-interest is avowedly the ruling motive, it seeks to establish at once an all-reaching and all-controlling altruism. In a world where every man is pushing and fighting to outstrip his fellows, it would make him toil with like vigor for their common welfare. In a world where a man's activity is measured by the nearness of reward, it would hold up a prospective recompense as an equal stimulant to labor. … In the future, when the remoteness of his reward shall have weakened the laborer's zeal, we shall be able to judge more fairly of the blessings that the communist offers.”

Benjamin N. Cardozo (1870–1938) United States federal judge

Other writings, The Altruist in Politics (1889)

Men, World, Hope, History

“Real manliness is about self-possession, self-control, and self-sacrifice. A real man will never be a bully, he will stand up to bullies.”

Robert P. George (1955) American legal scholar

Twitter post https://twitter.com/McCormickProf/status/911687981362286594 (23 September 2017) 2017

“The effective decisions can only be made by the independently thinking and adequately informed human individuals and their telepathically intercommunicated wisdom--the wisdom of the majority of all such human individuals--qualifying for continuance in Universe as local cosmic problem-solvers--in love with the truth and in individually spontaneous self-commitment to absolute faith in the wisdom, integrity, and love of God, who seems to wish Earthian humans to survive.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

From 1980s onwards, Critical Path (1981)

Love, Wisdom, God, Truth

“I mean by pacifism, not the love of peace as a good to be secured by a definite form of action, but the belief that any form of social constraint of others or any violent action is in itself wrong, and that violence such as war must be passively resisted because to use violence to end violence would be logically self-contradictory. I oppose pacifism in this sense to the Communist belief that the only way to secure peace is by a revolutionary change in the social system, and that ruling classes resist revolution violently and must therefore be overthrown by force.”

Christopher Caudwell (1907–1937) British Marxist literary critic, journalist and writer

Studies in a Dying Culture (1938), Pacifism and Violence: A Study in Bourgeois Ethics

Love, War, Peace, Way

“In its resistance to the great attack on traditional dogma launched by the Enlightenment, the Protestant theology of the 19th century … had very largely agreed in taking up a defensive position in which the truth of Christian faith was to be proved by demonstrating the indispensability of religious feeling to all higher humanity. … Yet on this basis it was not possible to refute the contention of Ludwig Feuerbach that the secret of theology is anthropology. … The secret of God was in truth that of self-glorifying man speaking of God and extolling his own divinity.”

Helmut Gollwitzer (1908–1993) German theologian and author

Source: Introduction to Church Dogmatics (1957), pp. 12-13

God, Truth, Secret, Faith

“Thou wilt draw nigh!
Father — it is no dream that Thou art near —
No dream that, in my sin and misery,
I may look up to Thee,—
May hide beneath the shadow of Thy wings,
From all the restlessness of outward things,
And from my own heart's self-accusing fears —
For Thou art nigh.”

Hetty Bowman (1838–1872)

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 432.

Fear, Dreams, Art, Heart

“The slim and agile baritone, Vytas Juozapaitis, portrayed the Don as a self centered nobleman. He sang with a pleasant voice, and unlike most interpreters of the role, he had no trouble tossing off the 'Champagne Aria' at top speed.”

Vytautas Juozapaitis (1963) Lithuanian opera singer

Opera Japonica (October, 2003)

Speed

“Kandinsky understood 'form' as a form, like an object in the real world; and a object, he said, was a narrative – and so, of course, he disapproved of it. He wanted ‘his music without words’. He wanted to be 'simple as a child'. He intended, with his 'inner-self' to rid himself of 'philosophical barricades' (he sat down and wrote something about all this). But in turn his own writing has become a philosophical barricade, even it is a barricade full of holes. It offers a kind of Middle European idea of Buddhism or, anyhow, something too theosophical for me.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

De Kooning's speech 'What Abstract Art means to me' on the symposium 'What is Abstract At' - at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 February, 1951, n.p.
1950's

World, Music, Idea

“Adieu, the city's ceaseless hum,
The haunts of sensual life, adieu!
Green fields, and silent glens we come,
To spend this bright spring-day with you.Whether the hills and vales shall gleam
With beauty, is for us to choose;
For leaf and blossom, rock and stream,
Are coloured with the spirit's hues.Here, to the seeking soul, is brought
A nobler view of human fate,
And higher feeling, higher thought,
And glimpses of a higher state.Through change of time, on sea and shore,
Serenely nature smiles away;
Yon infinite blue sky bends o'er
Our world, as at the primal day.The self-renewing earth is moved
With youthful life each circling year;
And flowers that Ceres' daughter loved
At Enna, now are blooming here.Glad nature will this truth reveal,
That God is ours and we are His.
O friends, my friends! what joy to feel
That He our loving Father is!”

James Aldrich (1810–1856) American editor and minor poet

A Spring-Day Walk.

Love, Life, God, Fate

“Self-preservation is the central aim of all life-activities.”

Boris Sidis (1867–1923) American psychiatrist

Source: Nervous Ills their Cause and Cure (1922), p. 20

Life

“The most powerful form of self-belief comes from believing in something greater than you. Because when you’ve got purpose, everything becomes possible.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

p 86
21 Yaks And A Speedo (2013)

“I do not tolerate the so-called "cultic" (or ego-made, and ego-reinforcing) approach to Me. I do not tolerate the seeking ego's "cult" of the "man in the middle". I am not a self-deluded ego-man—making much of himself, and looking to include everyone-and-everything around himself for the sake of social and political power. To be the "man in the middle" is to be in a Man-made trap, an absurd mummery of "cultic" devices that enshrines and perpetuates the ego-"I" in one and all. Therefore, I do not make or tolerate the religion-making "cult" of ego-Man. I do not tolerate the inevitable abuses of religion, of Spirituality, of Truth Itself, and of My own Person (even in bodily human Form) that are made (in endless blows and mockeries) by ego-based mankind when the Great Esoteric Truth of devotion to the Adept-Realizer is not rightly understood and rightly practiced.”

Adi Da Samraj (1939–2008) American writer

http://www.adidam.org/teaching/first_word/complete_text.html

Truth, Religion, Personality

“By a kind of happy pre-established harmony, such as a later age discovered between the needs of society and the self-interest of the individual, success in business is in itself almost a sign of spiritual grace, for it is a proof that a man has laboured faithfully in his vocation.”

R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) English philosopher

describing the Puritan view, Part IV, Ch. 4
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

Happiness, Age, Business, Success

“You see, the thing is, I’ve been in jams like this. The feeling is totally there among the musicians (and whoever else happens to be sitting around, whether they’ve paid for it or not, probably, and preferably, not). You are close to silence, Silence with a capital S. You are in tune with silence, the deepest sound of them all. Every sound, therefore, that you make, make with intention, sensitivity, and awareness, has a meaning, an ineffability, a significance. You are listening, Listening with a capital L. You hear what everyone else is doing; you do whatever is necessary, which is usually as little as possible. It has nothing to do with self-expression: it has to do with a group mind.”

Robert Fripp (1946) English guitarist, composer and record producer

Robert Fripp: From King Crimson to Guitar Craft (Eric Tamm)

Feeling, Silence

“A man hunted only for food or clothing or in self-defense. It was another mark of the effete and the sadistic to take life as a sport.”

Tanith Lee book The Storm Lord

Source: The Storm Lord (1976), Chapter 11 (p. 155)

Life, Food, Sport, Clothes

“The self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment—the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts inside one's head, the sense of being an owner or inhabitant of a physical body, which this false self seems to appropriate as a kind of vehicle. Even if you don't believe such a homunculus exists—perhaps because you believe, on the basis of science, that you are identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein—you almost certainly feel like an internal self in almost every waking moment. And yet, however one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found. It cannot be seen amid the particulars of experience, and it cannot be seen when experience itself is viewed as a totality. However, its absence can be found—and when it is, the feeling of being a self disappears.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: 2010s, Waking Up (2014), p. 92

Feeling, Sense, Science, Falseness

“You are god in your own universe. There is no god unless it is self.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

[39, Psychobabble: The Failure of Modern Psychology - and the Biblical Alternative, Richard L. Ganz, 1993, Crossway Books, 0891077340]
Attributed

God, Universe

“Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework — an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self- sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life.”

Betty Friedan book The Feminine Mystique

Source: The Feminine Mystique (1963), Ch. 1 "The Problem That Has No Name".

Life, Pain, Children, Problem

“Culture is the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization, that operate unconsciously and define in a basic 'taken for granted' fashion an organization's view of its self and its environment.”

Edgar H. Schein (1928) Psychologist

Source: Organizational Culture and Leadership, 1985, p. 6-7

Fashion

“Freedom is not an abstraction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more of it is not enough either. Having less, being less, impoverished in freedom and rights, women then inevitably have less self-respect: less self-respect than men have and less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and honest life. Intercourse as domination battens of that awful absence of self respect.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 7

Life, Women, Men, Freedom

“Self-love seems so often unrequited.”

Anthony Powell A Dance to the Music of Time

The Acceptance World (1955), ch. 1.
A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975)

Love

“Smith distinguishes with great sophistication the different kinds of reasons people have in taking an interest in the lives of others, separating out sympathy, generosity, public spirit and other motivations. Even though he acknowledged the role of mental attitudes and predispositions, he went on to discuss how reasoning, which is at the heart of rationality, must have a big role in preventing us from being – consciously or unconsciously – too self-centred, or thoughtlessly uncaring.”

Amartya Sen (1933) Indian economist

“Values and justice”, Journal of Economic Methodology, Vol. 19, No. 2, June 2012, 101–108
2010s, “Values and Justice”, 2012

People, Motivation, Heart

“We cannot think of dads as being nurturing if we think of men as being self-serving.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 240.

Men, Thinking

“We would like every country to be self-sufficient so that both in terms of running a good primary health care system and funding a good primary health care system, it’s all OK, and they just participate in regional bodies that have standby capacity to deal with these things. Africa, of all the places in the world, is the furthest behind on being able to do that. And through aid, health and health systems in Africa have improved very, very dramatically.”

Bill Gates (1955) American business magnate and philanthropist

politico.com http://www.politico.com/story/2014/09/transcript-bill-gates-lessons-from-leaders-interview-111470.html Politico.com interview 2014

Health, World, Country

“Our civilization has essentially globalized only the surfaces of our lives. But our inner self continues to have a life of its own. And the fewer answers the era of rational knowledge provides to the basic questions of human Being, the more deeply it would seem that people, behind its back as it were, cling to the ancient certainties of their tribe. Because of this, individual cultures, increasingly lumped together by contemporary civilization, are realizing with new urgency their own inner autonomy and the inner differences of others.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World (1994)

Life, People, Question, Knowledge

“And that, of course, is the tragic flaw in the narcotics laws — that possession of marijuana is a felony. Regardless of whether it is as harmless as some believe, or as evil and vicious as others believe, savage and uncompromising law is bad law, and the good and humane judge will jump at any technicality that will keep him from imposing a penalty so barbaric and so cruel. The self-righteous pillars of church and society demand that "the drug traffic be stamped out" and think that making possession a felony will do the trick. Their ignorance of the roots of the drug traffic is as extensive as their ignorance of the law.”

John D. MacDonald (1916–1986) writer from the United States

Travis McGee series, (1969)

Law, Penalty, Thinking, Evil

“No words used in the Gospels can legitimately be twisted to mean unending punishment, and indeed, such an expression is self-contradictory. The main motive of punishment surely is to reform the sufferer; in school, to make a better scholar; in the State, to make a better citizen. If the punishment goes on forever when does the sufferer benefit by the punishment or use the lesson he has learned so painfully? If Hell were endless it would be valueless.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.286

School, Motivation, Hell, Suffering

“Indeed, we are face to face with a strange kind of Sikhism. The Sikh Gurus had worked and fought for the resurgence of Hinduism but now we are told that this resurgence is precisely the cause of Sikh uneasiness. Guru Govind Singh started sending Sikh Gyanis to Varanasi to learn Sanskrit and to study the Epics, the Puranas and other classics to understand the Adi Granth itself, but the neo-Akali ideologues find Sanskrit and these classics objectionable. Maharaja Ranjit Singh banned cow-killing in his kingdom and a hundred Sikhs were blown to smithereens by the British because they stood for cow-protection, but now it is an anathema to secularist Akali scholars. The fact is that it is not the old Sikhism of the Gurus but a new version of it which has been taking shape under the impact of very different ideological and political forces that we are meeting. This neo-Akalism is a child of self-alienation and spiritual illiteracy and it, is at odd not only with Hinduism but for that very reason with Sikhism itself.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Quoted from the preface by Ram Swarup in Gurbachan, S. T. S., & Swarup, R. (1991). Muslim League attack on Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab 1947.

Understanding, Study, Learning

“If you could once get away, my friends, from that sense of mediocrity and nothingness to which you are shut up, under the stupor of your self-seeking and your sin, how easy would it be for you to believe! Nay, if but some faintest suspicion could steal into you of what your soul is, and the tremendous evils working in it, nothing but the mystery of Christ's death and passion would be sufficient for you.”

Horace Bushnell (1802–1876) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 235.

Death, Soul, Sense, Passion

“In its essence, the right of self-determination means that individuals and peoples should be in control of their destinies and should be able to live out their identities, whether within the boundaries of existing States or through independence.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order on the right of self determination http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IntOrder/Pages/Reports.aspx. 2015, Report submitted to the UN General Assembly

People

“One can act too much in the cause of self-preservation and experience nothing fresh as a result.”

Michael Moorcock book The War Hound and the World's Pain

Source: The War Hound and the World's Pain (1981), Chapter 2 (p. 25)

“It is my purpose nowhere in these remarks to make personal reproaches; I entertain no ill-will toward any human being, nor any brute, that I know of, not even the skunk across the way to which I referred. Least of all would I reproach the South. I honor her courage and fidelity. Even in a bad, a wicked cause, she shows a united front. All her sons are faithful to the cause of human bondage, because it is their cause. But the North - the poor, timid, mercenary, driveling North - has no such united defenders of her cause, although it is the cause of human liberty. None of the bright lights of the nation shine upon her section. Even her own great men have turned her accusers. She is the victim of low ambition - an ambition which prefers self to country, personal aggrandizement to the high cause of human liberty. She is offered up a sacrifice to propitiate southern tyranny - to conciliate southern treason.”

Thaddeus Stevens (1792–1868) American politician

June 10, 1850 in a speech before Congress on the Fugitive Slave Act. Page 123, Vol. 1, Palmer http://web.archive.org/web/20131209113445/http://thaddeusstevenssociety.com/Quotes.html. In Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens 1850s

Men, Faith, Way, Courage

“We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

Quoted in New York Times (21 February 1960).
Letters and interviews

Death

“(…) To take the world as real and one’s self as unreal is ignorance, the cause of sorrow. To know the self as the only reality and all else as temporal and transient is freedom, peace and joy. It is all very simple. Instead of seeing things as imagined, learn to see them as they are. When you can see everything as it is, you will also see yourself as you are. It is like cleansing a mirror. The same mirror that shows you the world as it is, will also show you your own face. The thought ‘I am’ is the polishing cloth. Use it.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Reality
Source: "I am That." P.29.

World, Peace, Imagination, Reality

“There is a price which is too great to pay for peace, and that price can be put in one word. One cannot pay the price of self-respect.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

Des Moines Iowa speech (1 February 1916) http://www.combat.ws/S3/BAKISSUE/CMBT01N2/SMOKE.HTM, on "The Westerm Preparedness Tour" http://www.allthingswilliam.com/presidents/wilson.html 1910s

Peace