Self Quotes

For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is.

Johann von Goethe

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

Gustave Flaubert

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.

Charles Austin Beard, historian

If you feel yourself falling, let go and glide.

Steffen Francisco

Ahhh. A man with a sharp wit. Someone ought to take it away from him before he cuts himself.

Peter da Silva

Trust yourself, then you will know how to live.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself.

Michel de Montaigne

Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffered Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night - She was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question - Is this all.

Betty Naomi Friedan

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

Oprah Winfrey

Change is the end result of all true learning. Change involves three things First, a dissatisfaction with self - A felt void or need second, a decision to change - To fill the void or need and third, a conscious dedication to the process of growth and change - The willful act of making the change Doing Something.

Dr.

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.

Galileo Galilei

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but usually manages to pick himself up, walk over or around it, and carry on.

Winston Churchill, Quoted in: Irving Klotz, Bending perception, a book review, Nature, 1996, Volume 379, p 412

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Thomas Paine

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Iris Murdoch

But you can catch yourself entertaining habitually certain ideas and setting others aside; and that, I think, is where our personal destinies are largely decided.

Alfred North Whitehead

Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.

Johnson

If the programmer can simulate a construct faster then the compiler can implement the construct itself, then the compiler writer has blown it badly.

Guy L. Steele Jr., Tartan Laboratories

A little flesh, a little breath, and a Reason to rule all - That is myself.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, "Meditations", book 2.

Mortification from a self - Strength, carried on by ways of self - Invention, unto the end of a self - Righteousness, is the soul and substnace of all false religion in the world.

John Owen

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

Sun - Tzu

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

Kahlil Gibran

What the superior man seeks is in himself what the small man seeks is in others.

Confucius

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

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 sea shore and diverting himself and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell that ordinary while the greater ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Isaac Newton

A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

I might repeat to myself slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound - If I can remember any of the damn things.

Dorothy Parke

He alone is wise who can accommodate himself to all contingencies of life; but the fool contends, and struggling, like a swimmer, against the stream.

Latin

It was when Lucifer first congratulated himself upon his angelic behavior that he became the tool of evil.

Dag Hammarskjld

Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.

David Mamet

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

I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.

Russell Bake

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

Rita Mae Brown

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions? especially selfish ones.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Peace and Violence, sct. 2, in Index, no. 4 (London, 1973.

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Iris Murdoch

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

Sir Richard F. Burton

The movies are the only business where you can go out front and applaud yourself.

Will Rogers