Self Quotes

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Scott Adams

Everyone makes a greater effort to hurt other people than to help himself.

Alexis Carrel

There is a great deal of wishful thinking in such cases; it is the easiest thing of all to deceive one? s self.

Demosthenes, Olynthiac

I like less the story that a frog if put in cold water will not bestir itself if that water is heated up slowly and gradually and will in the end let itself be boiled alive, too comfortable with continuity to realize that continuous change at some point may become intolerable and demand a change in behavior.

Charles Handy - The Age of Unreason

If it come to prohibiting, there is aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.

John Milton

Conquering others takes force, conquering yourself is true strength.

Lao - Tzu

As an athlete, when you least expect it, you may find yourself standing on the threshold of an accomplishment so monumental that it strikes fear into your soul. You must stand ready, at any moment, to face the unknown. You must be ready to walk boldly thru the wall of uncertainty.

John "The Penguin" Bingham, The courage to start

Instead of solid accomplishments, the man pursues pleasures and self - Gratification. He will never achieve anything so long as he is surrounded by dissipating temptations.

I Ching

Sometimes the child in one behaves a certain way and the rest of oneself follows behind, slowly shaking its head.

Niels Henrik David Boh

But respect yourself most of all.

Golden verses of the Pythagoreans

Man is immortal therefore he must die endlessly. For life is a creative idea it can only find itself in changing forms.

Rabindranath Tagore

Guilt resembles a sword with two edges. On the one hand, it cuts for Justice, imposing practical morality upon those who fear it. But there is another side to that weighted emotion. Conscience does not always adhere to rational judgment. Guilt is always a self - Imposed burden, but it is not always rightly imposed.

R. A. Salvatore, Sojourn

Be honorable yourself if you wish to associate with honorable people.

Welsh Prove

It is certain that the real function of art is to increase our self - Consciousness; to make us more aware of what we are, and therefore of what the universe in which we live really is. And since mathematics, in its own way, also performs this function, it is not only aesthetically charming but profoundly significant. It is an art, and a great art.

John W. N. Sullivan

What a searching preacher of self - Command is the varying phenomenon of health.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Few people think more than two or three times a year I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

George Bernard Shaw

That man can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that he can create it, for life is the miracle, the inexplicable. In the act of destruction, man sets himself above life he transcends himself as a creature. Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate.

Erich Fromm

When I consider the small span of my life absorbed in the eternity of all time, or the small part of space which I can touch or see engulfed by the infinite immensity of spaces that I know not and that know me not, I am frightened and astonished to see myself here instead of there... now instead of then.

Blaise Pascal

I check myself every day just to make sure this is the same person.

Tony Kanal

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

Marcus Aurelius

Self - Pity is easily the most destructive of the nonpharmaceutical narcotics it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality.

John W. Gardne

Men should not trust in God as if God did all, and yet labor earnestly as is he himself did all.

Allan K. Chalmers

By constant self - Discipline and self - Control you can develop greatness of characte.

Grenville Kleise

We must not just be in the world and above the world, but also of the world. To love it for what it is... is the only task. Avoid it and you are lost. Loose yourself in it, and you are free.

Henry Miller, in a letter to Lawrence Durrell

At sixteen I was stupid, confused, insecure and indecisive. At twenty - Five I was wise, self - Confident, prepossessing and assertive. At forty - Five I am stupid, confused, insecure and indecisive. Who would have supposed that maturity is only a short break in adolescence?

Jules Feiffe

You get the best out of others when you give the best of yourself.

Harry Firestone

There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.

Hermann Hesse

What is the use of physicians like myself trying to help parents to bring up children healthy and happy, to have them killed in such numbers for a cause that is ignoble.

Benjamin Spock

The reason of a resolution is more to be considered than the resolution itself.

Sir John Holt

Life is not meaningful to us unless serving an end beyond itself, unless it is of value to someone else.

Abraham J. Herschel

Every man has inside himself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to his advantage.

William S. Burroughs

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

Kurt Vonnegut

One must know oneself, if this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

Blaise Pascal

It meant that New York philanthropists, New York society, would now rediscover the library. ... that learning, books, education have glamour, that self - Improvement has glamour, that hope has glamour.

Vartan Gregorian

Do you know what a pessimist is? A man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

George Bernard Shaw, An Unsocial Socialist (1887) ch. 5