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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"Perhaps, in retrospect, there would be little motivation even for malevolent extraterrestrials to attack the Earth; perhaps, after a preliminary survey, they might decide it is more expedient just to be patient for a little while and wait for us to self-destruct."
"Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship."
"My feeling is that the concept of creativeness and the concept of the healthy, self actualizing, fully human person seem to be coming closer and closer together, and may perhaps turn out to be the same thing"
"No one likes to be criticized, of course, but if the things we successfully strive for do not make our future selves happy, or if the things we unsuccessfully avoid do, then it seems reasonable (if somewhat ungracious) for them to cast a disparaging glance backward and wonder what the hell we were thinking."
"Whether we learn how to love ourselves and others will depend on the presence of a loving environment. Self-love cannot flourish in isolation."
"If we give our children sound self-love, they will be able to deal with whatever life puts before them."
"I think this is often misunderstood in the West, where people feel that there can be no justice unless everything is the same. This is part of why I feel we have to relearn how we think about love, because we think about love so much in terms of the self."
"To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself."
"Every time feels like my first time. And I just find that the process of it feeds into one's own self-obsession."
"Every single time I step into the studio, I say, 'Can I still do this? Do I still have it? Have I ever had it?' I suppose there's a good amount of self-loathing that goes into any form of artisanship."
"A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it."
"To be able to have that self-respect for yourself and just that feeling of, OK, I did what I could, just stay true to yourself.If you feel that this is something that's valid and you should go out there and win, then push through it no matter what the outcome is. Just know that nine times out of 10 that no matter whether you were right or you were wrong, the NFL is a business."
"Nothing is so tiresome to one's self, as well as so odious to others, as disguise and affectation."
"The first Degree of Folly, is to conceit one's self wise; the second to profess it; the third to despise Counsel."
"To become a token woman - whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters - is to become something less than a man... since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest."
"Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society."
"There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness."
"Such techniques, including meta-discursive stuff, self-reference, irony, black humor, cynicism, grotesquerie and shock, it would be safe to say that television or televisual values rule the culture. Television is successfully using a lot of those same techniques but using them for a very different agenda, which is to sort of create an ethos and please people and to sell products to consumers."
"Tennis's beauty's infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win."
"The deepest hunger in life is a secret that is revealed only when a person is willing to unlock a hidden part of the self. In the ancient traditions of wisdom, this quest has been likened to diving for the most precious pearl in existence, a poetic way of saying that you have to swim far out beyond shallow waters, plunge deep into yourself, and search patiently until the pearl beyond price is found."
