Self Quotes

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting.

E e cummings

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Isaac Newton, From Brewster, Memoirs of Newton (1855)

When you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself.

Isaac Bashevis Singe

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

Few are agreeable in conversation, because each thinks of what he intends to say than of what others are saying, and listens no more when he himself has a chance to speak.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - And you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman, Caltech commencement address, 1974

One must not be mean with the affections what is spent of the fund is renewed in the spending itself.

Sigmund Freud

Getting in touch with your true self must be your first priority.

Tom Hopkins

Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer into a selflessness which links us with all humanity.

Lady Nancy Asto

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

Harvey Firestone

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

Arthur Mille

It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise.

W. Somerset Maugham

There is a certain impertinance in allowing oneself to be burned for an opinion.

Anatole France

Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention.

Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to J. M. Cutts, October 26, 1863

Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself.

Rita Mae Brown

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

Daniel Webste

No man resolved to make the most of himself has time to waste on personal contention.

Abraham Lincoln

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.

Aldous Huxley

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.

Rebecca West

I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After - Life spell, And by and by my Soul returned to me, And answered I Myself am Heaven and Hell.

Omar Khayym

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

Sir Richard F. Burton

Promises that you make to yourself are often like the Japanese plum tree - They bear no fruit.

Francis Marion

A tree never hits an automobile except in self defense.

American Prove

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself - Always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

James Earl Jimmy Carter, Jr.

Who to himself is law, no law doth need.

Arthur Chapman

He who has injured thee was stronger or weaker than thee. If weaker, spare him if stronger, spare thyself.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

If you wish me to weep, you must mourn first yourself.

Horace

The self - Controlled soul, who moves amongst sense objects, free from either attachment or repulsion, he wins eternal Peace.

Bhagavad Gita

No evil is without its compensation. The less money, the less trouble the less favor, the less envy. Even in those cases which put us out of wits, it is not the loss itself, but the estimate of the loss that troubles us.

Seneca

Greatness sympathises with greatness, and littleness shrinks into itself.

William Hazlitt, on the Pleasure of Hating

To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.

Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do, Ohara Publications

Your purpose in relationships is simply to be your best self, regardless of the circumstances.

Rosalene Glickman, Ph. D., Optimal Thinking: How to Be Your Best Self

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.

James Arthur Baldwin

Boldness in itself is genius.

L. Ron Hubbard

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

Henry David Thoreau

The truth is that there is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else. The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self.

Whitney Young

More important than talent, strength, or knowledge is the ability to laugh at yourself and enjoy the pursuit of your dreams.

Amy Grant