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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"Do not all theists insist that there can be no morality, no justice, honesty or fidelity without the belief in a Divine Power? Based upon fear and hope, such morality has always been a vile product, imbued partiy with self-righteousness, partly with hypocrisy."
"The self is the resultant of the interest of the genes."
"There's already a lot of self-exculpatory history being written. Right across the board. And it's my task to make sure that such self-exculpatory histories cannot be written."
"We forget that, although each of the liberties which have been won must be defended with utmost vigour, the problem of freedom is not only a quantitative one, but a qualitative one; that we not only have to preserve and increase the traditional freedom, but that we have to gain a new kind of freedom, one which enables us to realize our own individual self; to have faith in this self and in life."
"In Kafka we have the modern mind, seemingly self-sufficient, intelligent, skeptical, ironical, splendidly trained for the great game of pretending that the world it comprehends in sterilized sobriety is the only and ultimate real one – yet a mind living in sin with the soul of Abraham. Thus he knows Two things at once, and both with equal assurance: that there is no God, and that there must be God."
"I was very, very nervous about the naked scenes. I'm very shy and reserved. But it was Bertolucci and I have seen Last Tango. It's not pornographic. He's a master of eroticism. I stopped being self-conscious. You have to forget everything."
"Hollywood wouldn't suit me. In L.A. it's all about work - studio people have their five minutes with you and they go, 'Oh mah Gahd, I love your movie.' You just feel very self-conscious there."
"When you birth a child, it's like a bloody giving of self to the creation of a life."
"Sometimes it'll happen to people, that their self will stop coming through. And people will just cease to understand them."
"But music is reflection of self, we just explain it, and then we get our checks in the mail."
"When you write a novel, there’s a level at which you are much more revealing about who you are because you’re less self-conscious about how you’re presenting yourself. You are accidentally leaving your DNA all over everything in a novel because it’s all coming from you."
"There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author's self- effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice."
"Most timidities have such secret compensations and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self depreciation."
"Make ones center of life inside ones self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity."
"Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood."
"Our grocery store now has self-checkout, for your convenience. It's like getting punched in the throat, for your comfort."
"The self is defined psychologically as the psychic totality of the individual. Anything that a [person] postulates as being a greater totality than [oneself] can become a symbol of the self. For this reason the symbol of the self is not always as total as the definition would require."
"Whereas I formerly believed it to be my bounden duty to call other persons to order, I now admit that I need calling to order myself."
"The symbols of the self arise from the depths of the body."
"There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything."
