Self Quotes

If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

Henry James

The trouble is that everyone talks about reforming others, and no one thinks about reforming himself.

Peter Alcantara

Breathe. Let go. And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure.

Oprah Winfrey, O Magazine, September 2002

Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing. Let everyone know that you have a reserve in yourself that you have more power than you are now using. If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it.

James A. Garfield

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, this is no other life but this.

Henry David Thoreau

My schoolmates would make love to anything that moved, but I never saw any reason to limit myself.

Emo Philips

Have no friends not equal to yourself.

Confucius, The Confucian Analects

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

All outward forms of religion are almost useless, and are the causes of endless strife. Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself, and never mind the rest.

Beatrix Potte

Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid, one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.

Douglas MacArthu

Be sure that it is not you that is mortal, but only your body. For that man whom your outward form reveals is not yourself the spirit is the true self, not that physical figure which and be pointed out by your finger.

Cicero

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

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.

Frederick Douglas

You do not need to be loved, not at the cost of yourself. The single relationship that is truly central and crucial in a life is the relationship to the self. Of all the people you will know in a lifetime, you are the only one you will never lose.

Jo Coudert, "Advice From A Failure".

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

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

No man is happy who does not think himself so.

Publilius Syrus

If one looks with a cold eye at the mess man has made of history, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has been afflicted by some built - In mental disorder which drives him towards self - Destruction.

Arthur Koestle

Modern Man is the victim of the very instruments he values most. Every gain in power, every mastery of natural forces, every scientific addition to knowledge, has proved potentially dangerous, because it has not been accompanied by equal gains in self - Understanding and self - Discipline.

Lewis Mumford

By these things examine thyself. By whose rules am I acting; in whose name; in whose strength; in whose glory? What faith, humility, self - Denial, and love of God and to man have there been in all my actions?

Jackie Mason

Surround yourself with only people who are going to lift you higher.

Oprah Winfrey

Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life - In firmness of mind and a mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk; and to make our words and actions all of a color.

Seneca

Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest.

Charles Dickens

I have always regarded myself as the pillar of my life.

Meryl Streep

He that cannot forgive others, breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass if he would ever reach heaven; for everyone has need to be forgiven.

Lord Herbert

Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but that mark of a fake messiah.

Richard Bach

Somehow he Tim gets thoughtful sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant for them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.

Charles Dickens

There are three classes of intellects one which comprehends by itself another which appreciates what others comprehend and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others the first is the most excellent, the second is good, and the third is useless.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

Pablo Picasso

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.

Harry S Truman

I never could have done what I have done without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one subject at a time...

Charles Dickens

The power of one is above all things The power to believe in yourself Often well beyond any latent ability previously demonstrated. The mind is the athlete, The body is simply the means it uses.

Bryce Courtenay

Creation is a better means of self - Expression than possession; it is through creating, not possessing, that life is revealed.

Vida D. Scudde

When marrying, ask yourself this question Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age Everything else in marriage is transitory.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.

Sir Thomas Browne

I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for the truth and truth rewarded me.

Simone de Beauvoi

Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.

Blaise Pascal, Pensees(II, 72)

Becoming a star may not be your destiny, but being the best you can be is a goal that you can set for yourself.

Brian Lindsay