Self quotes
12.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside self — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"When we're dealing with the people in our family - no matter how annoying or gross they may be, no matter how self-inflicted their suffering may appear, no matter how afflicted they are with ignorance, prejudice or nose hairs - we give from the deepest parts of ourselves."
"I find most famous Christians to be full of themselves and of prejudice and self-loathing, masquerading as devout religious belief. I find all fundamentalism to be terrifying and very destructive."
"I am not at home in myself. I am my own stranger."
"You'd be better served ifyou gave me a moment to regain my self-control and let me remove my boots. It's the least agentleman can do.""And you're such a gentleman.""Not with you, love. But I'm trying."
"The greatest victory is over self."
"Both Self-restraint and Unrestraint are a matter of extremes as compared with the character of the mass of mankind; the restrained man shows more and the unrestrained man less steadfastness than most men are capable of."
"Therefore the good man ought to be a lover of self, since he will then both benefit himself by acting nobly and aid his fellows; but the bad man ought not to be a lover of self, since he will follow his base passions, and so injure both himself and his neighbors. With the bad man therefore, what he does is not in accord with what he ought to do, but the good man does what he ought, since intelligence always chooses for itself that which is best, and the good man obeys his intelligence."
"The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing."
"Self-confidence is something caught and not taught. And, risk-running and chance-taking are the only ways to catch it."
"I think one must take responsibility for one's actions and one's decisions. But one should never take -- one should never assume that everything that happens for the good is achieved by one's self alone."
"One can study what exists and how consciousness functions; but one cannot analyze (or “prove”) existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to “prove” them is self-contradict ory: it is an attempt to “prove” existence by means of nonexistence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness .)"
"Each man must live as an end in himself and follow his own rational self-interest."
"To speak about this universal force that will lead us beyond on the last horizon of our known self toward a wiser, more loving, more luminous states of being, we do not need to invent a new language. But we do need to listen to the old, the ancient one, not with our jaded minds, but with our awakened souls."
"Usually all my tattoos came at good times. A tattoo is something permanent when you've made a self-discovery, or something you've come to a conclusion about."
"I just started to see the world as it really is and it completely shocked me and changed my opinion on everything.. on life and my values and certainly my own sense of self."
"Self-care means accepting some risk, and accepting much responsibility. It is not for all people or all cases."
"There is no doubt that Iraqis, like Australians and Americans, love and desire freedom. However, if freedom doesn't mean the right to complete self-determination, unfettered by interests other than one's own, then that freedom is less than worthless - it's oppression."
"Abortion is an act of self-defense."
"Storytelling, you know, has a real function. The process of the storytelling is itself a healing process, partly because you have someone there who is taking the time to tell you a story that has great meaning to them. They're taking the time to do this because your life could use some help, but they don't want to come over and just give advice. They want to give it to you in a form that becomes inseparable from your whole self. That's what stories do. Stories differ from advice in that, once you get them, they become a fabric of your whole soul. That is why they heal you."
"Meditation is like the cloak of the good thief. You find a corner or somewhere where you can actually entertain your own self and your own soul, and understand what your work [is] here."
