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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"Private fortunes, in the present state of our circulation, are at the mercy of those self-created money lenders, and are prostrated by the floods of nominal money with which their avarice deluges us."
"I deem no government safe which is under the vassalage of any self-constituted authorities, or any other authority than that of the nation, or its regular functionaries."
"There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him."
"For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self."
"Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences."
"The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children."
"The first thing I would do for anyone who's trying to lose body fat, for instance, would be to remove foods from the house that he or she would consume during lapses of self-control."
"You know when you tell a self-deprecating story at a dinner party, everyone's laughing along with you? But then when someone else repeats that same story at another dinner party you feel they're all laughing at you?"
"There is really no practical help that one can offer: it is a matter of self-discovery, of one's own conviction, or working with one's own work; your style is what seems natural to you. It is a long process of discovery, one that never ends. I am working at it, and will be as long as I live."
"Truth without love is imperious self-righteousn ess. Love without truth is cowardly self-indulgence ."
"Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world."
"The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also."
"Drunkenness is nothing but a self-induced state of insanity."
"The only real help is self-help. Anything else is just designed to get you to the point where you can help yourself."
"It's like, at the end, there's this surprise quiz: Am I proud of me? I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth what I paid?"
"public self is a conditioned construct of the inner psychological self."
"A string of reproaches against other people leads one to suspect the existence of a string of self-reproaches with the same content."
"One of the biggest things I've done is learn how to love myself, flaws and all. Even the things I don't like about myself, I accept. People have made fun of me and made me self-conscious about talking so softly, for example, but I accept that as who I am and I'm not changing it for anybody. I'm at peace with who I am now, and once you've achieved that, all the other stuff disappears."
"A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war."
"The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion - in the long run, these are the only people who count."
