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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"It is hard to bear with people who stand still along the way, lose heart, and seek their happiness in little pleasures which they cling to...You feel sad about all that self-indulgence and self-satisfaction, for you know with an indestructible certainty that something greater is coming."
"Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love."
"What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism."
"The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self."
"In the early 1940s, as a young teenager, I was utterly appalled by the racist and jingoist hysteria of the anti-Japanese propaganda. The Germans were evil, but treated with some respect: They were, after all, blond Aryan types, just like our imaginary self-image. Japanese were mere vermin, to be crushed like ants."
"National self-sufficiency or "autarchy" is the ideal of [Adolf] Hitler, not of [Karl] Marx and [Vladimir] Lenin."
"One is given to self-dramatization from time to time. I intend to live forever."
"The act of writing for the slave constituted the act of creating a public, historical self, not only the self of the individual author but also the self, as it were, of the race."
"Self-love is a big part of golf."
"Fastidiousness is only another word for egotism; and all men who know not where to look for truth save in the narrow well of self will find their own image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they are seeking."
"Love contending with friendship, and self with each generous impulse. To and fro in his breast his thoughts were heaving and dashing, As in a foundering ship."
"It is very noble hypocrisy not to talk of one's self."
"Subordination to morality can be slavish or vain or self- interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of despair, just as subordination to a prince can be: in itself it is nothing moral."
"In pain there is as much wisdom as in pleasure: like the latter it is one of the best self preservatives of a species."
"Those moralists, on the other hand, who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions."
"He who is usually self-sufficient becomes exceptionally vain and keenly alive to fame and praise when he is physically ill. The more he loses himself the more he has to endeavor to regain his position by means of the opinion of others."
"You are your own forerunner, and the towers you have builded are but the foundation of your giant-self. And that self too shall be a foundation."
"Understanding of the self only arises in relationship, in watching yourself in relationship to people, ideas, and things; to trees, the earth, and the world around you and within you. Relationship is the mirror in which the self is revealed. Without self-knowledge there is no basis for right thought and action."
"Compassion being action without motive, without self-interest, without any sense of fear, without any sense of pleasure."
"Through self-knowledge you begin to find out what is God, what is truth, what is that state which is timeless. In self-knowledge is the whole universe; it embraces all the struggles of humanity."
