Self Quotes

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Jalal ud - Din Rumi

Thinking is like loving and dying. Each of us must do it for himself.

Josiah Royce

Glory built on selfish principles is shame and guilt.

William Cowpe

Physical pain however great ends in itself and falls away like dry husks from the mind, whilst moral discords and nervous horrors sear the soul.

Alice James

What the superior man seeks is in himself. What the mean man seeks is in others.

Confucius, The Confucian Analects

A lot of people run a race to see who is fastest. I run to see who has the most guts, who can punish himself into exhausting pace, and then at the end, punish himself even more. Nobody is going to win a 5, 000 meter race after running an easy 2 miles. Not with me. If I lose forcing the pace all the way, well, at least I can live with myself.

Steve Prefontaine

Do not measure your loss by itself; if you do, it will seem intolerable; but if you will take all human affairs into account you will find that some comfort is to be derived from them.

Saint Basil

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

Napolean Hill

Only as you do know yourself can your brain serve you as a sharp and efficient tool. Know your own failings, passions, and prejudices so you can separate them from what you see.

Bernard M. Baruch

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

If I take care of my character, my reputation will take care of itself.

D. L. Moody

Book dedication To myself, without whose inspired and tireless efforts this book would not have been possible.

Al Jaffee

His mother called such people ignorant and superstitious, but his father only shook his head slowly and puffed his pipe and said that sometimes old stories had a grain or two of truth in them and it was best not to take chances. It was why, he said, he crossed himself whenever a black cat crossed his path.

Stephen King

I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence, but it comes from within. It is there all the time.

Anna Freud

Your first appearance, he said to me, is the gauge by which you will be measured try to manage that you may go beyond yourself in after times, but beware of ever doing less.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils; The motions of his spirit are dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself.

James Thurber, in Edward R. Murrow television interview

When God wants to speak and deal with us, he does not avail himself of an angel but of parents, or the pastor, or of our neighbor.

Martin Luthe

This above all to thine own self be true.

William Shakespeare

This is the true joy in life - - Being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one...

George Bernard Shaw

Never expose yourself unnecessarily to danger a miracle may not save you... and if it does, it will be deducted from your share of luck or merit.

The Talmud

Never esteem anything as an advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self - Respect.

Marcus Aelius Aurelius

I have found a desire within myself that no experience in this world can satisfy; the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

C. S. Lewis

For no phase of life, whether public or private, whether in business or in the home, whether one is working on what concerns oneself alone or dealing with another, can be without its moral duty; on the discharge of such duties depends all that is morally right, and on their neglect all that is morally wrong in life.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Duties I

To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.

Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

Gustave Flaubert

An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

George Orwell

Be more splendid, more extraordinary. Use every moment to fill yourself up.

Oprah Winfrey, O Magazine, February 2003

Laugh at yourself first, before anyone else can.

Elsa Maxwell, September 28, 1958

Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go much further than people with vastly superior talent.

Sophia Loren

I live in the crowds of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself.

Samuel Johnson

If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse - As a man shoots himself.

H. L. Mencken

Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.

Pope John XXIII

There are pauses amidst study, and even pauses of seeming idleness, in which a process goes on which may be likened to the digestion of food. In those seasons of repose, the powers are gathering their strength for new efforts; as land which lies fallow recovers itself for tillage.

J. W. Alexande

Nature herself makes the wise man rich.

Cicero

Do not measure your loss by itself if you do, it will seem intolerable but if you will take all human affairs into account you will find that some comfort is to be derived from them.

Saint Basil

Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?

Jane Austen