Self quotes
12.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside self — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"This new meta-system is very much in favor of the self, but a self that is based on a proper sense of dignity, not on an inflated ego. A person who dare not admit he is wrong inflates his ego but weakens his self."
"In 1985, a group of mujahedeen came to Washington and was greeted by President Reagan, who called them "freedom fighters." These people, by the way, don't represent Islam in any formal sense. They're not imams or sheiks. They are self-appointed warriors for Islam."
"[Mujahedeen], by the way, don't represent Islam in any formal sense. They're not imams or sheiks. They are self-appointed warriors for Islam."
"What is revenge but courage to call in our honor's debts, and wisdom to convert others' self-love into our own protection?"
"Man, like Deity, creates in his own image."
"I have a great objection to seeing anyone, particularly anyone whom I care about, lose his self-control."
"Creative writing and shooting are muscles that atrophy. But when you work them, you become a self-generator who can branch out."
"I have to be self-conscious of what I'm trying to do with my life."
"Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone."
"I have a rigid self-accountability. You have to work hard."
"the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love."
"If Todd [Willingham] was guilty of anything, it was just his self-preservation. He got up and ran out of the house and then thought about the children after the fact."
"To say that historical conditions made personal life possible, and with it the self-consciousness that allowed psychoanalysis to emerge, is to tell half the story: one also has to consider that the erotic impulse, ever pressing for satisfaction, had something to do with making the history that encouraged its expression."
"If believers feel that their faith is trivialized and their true selves compromised by a society that will not give religious imperatives special weight, their problem is not that secularists are antidemocratic but that democracy is antiabsolutist."
"The will to power is the will to ecstasy is the will to surrender is the will to submit and, in extremis, to die. Or to put it another way, the rage to attain a freedom and happiness one's psyche cannot accept creates enormous anxiety and ends in self-punishing despair."
"Self-driving cars are the natural extension of active safety and obviously something we should do."
"Were we to undertake an exhaustive self-scrutiny, disgust would paralyze us, we would be doomed to a thankless existence."
"Joseph is the wearisomest and self-righteous Pharisee who ever ransacked the Bible to rake the promises to himself and fling the curses on his neighbor."
"Elisa Albert in a nutshell: funny, self-aware, and genuinely fearless that she might be a lunatic, or a genius, or both."
"The Christian religion and morality extols the glory of the Hereafter, and therefore remains indifferent to the horrors of the earth. Indeed, the idea of self-denial and of all that makes for pain and sorrow is its test of human worth, its passport to the entry into heaven."
