Self Quotes

Of all the self - Fulfilling prophecies in our culture, the assumption that aging means decline and poor health is probably the deadliest.

Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, 1980

Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.

Lois McMaster Bujold, "A Civil Campaign", 1999

Educate your children to self - Control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.

Benjamin Franklin

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.

Joseph Campbell

The fear of making permanent commitments can change the mutual love of husband and wife into two loves of self - Two loves existing side by side, until they end in separation.

Pope John Paul II

Inside yourself or outside, you never have to change what you see, only the way you see it.

Thaddeus Golas

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.

Sir Richard F. Burton

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Franz Kafka

The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect he becomes an adolescent the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult the day he forgives himself he becomes wise.

Alden Nowlan

I said to myself that growing up really means slowing down.

Siri Hustvedt, What I Loved, pg. 336

A reputation for good judgment, for fair dealing, for truth, and for rectitude, is itself a fortune.

Henry Ward Beeche

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

G. K. Chesterton

The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; neither do we rejoice therein, because we control our lusts, but contrariwise, because we rejoice therein, we are able to control our lusts.

Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

Sir Winston Churchill

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

Sigmund Freud

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

Marcus Aelius Aurelius

The way to develop self - Confidence is to do the thing you fear and get a record of successful experiences behind you. Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.

William Jennings Bryan

Vegetarianism is harmless enough, though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self - Righteousness.

Sir Robert Hutchinson

The worst of all deceptions is self - Deception.

Saul Bellow

The mirror never sees itself. The reflection never is itself.

J. Gregory Keyes, "Babylon 5: Dark Genesis: The Birth of the Psi Corps".

The best leader is the one who has the sense to surround himself with outstanding people and self - Restraint not to meddle with how they do their jobs.

Author Unknown

Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture... Do not build up obstacles in your imagination.

Norman Vincent Peale

Approach each new problem not with a view of finding what you hope will be there, but to get the truth, the realities that must be grappled with. You may not like what you find. In that case you are entitled to try to change it. But do not deceive yourself as to what you do find to be the facts of the situation.

Bernard M. Baruch

The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.

Benjamin Franklin

A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.

Samuel Johnson

The most happy marriage I can imagine to myself would be the union of a deaf man to a blind woman.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

He who fights monsters should look into it that he himself does not become a monster. When you gaze long into the Abyss, the Abyss also gazes into you.

Friedrich Neitzsche

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

Franz Kafka

I believe that to meet the challenge of the next century, human beings will have to develop a greater sense of universal responsibility. Each of us must learn to work not just for his or her own self, family or nation, but for the benefit of all mankind.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama, speech? in 1994

A woman of honor should not expect of others things she would not do herself.

Marguerite de Valois

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.

Woodrow Wilson

Freedom, then, lies only in our innate human capacity to choose between different sorts of bondage, bondage to desire or self esteem, or bondage to the light that lightens all our lives.

Sri Madhava

The man who comes with a tale about others has himself an ax to grind.

Chinese prove

The only place you will be accepted is the place you make for yourself.

Holly Lisle, Fire In The Mist, 1992

He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.

Maya Angelou