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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"I would like to say when I turn the project over to the label that I have been successful. And that's truly the way I feel. But, in addition to the self-pride in 'making' a good album, to be honest, I'd love to have a hit record!"
"My mother's death put me in touch with my most savage self. As I've grown up and come to terms with her death and accepted it, the pieces of her that I keep don't exist materially."
"The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives. Perhaps the reason you've not yet been able to forgive yourself is that you're still invested in your self-loathing. Perhaps not forgiving yourself is the flip side of your stealing-this-now cycle. Would you be a better or worse person if you forgave yourself for the bad things you did? If you perpetually condemn yourself for being a liar and a thief, does that make you good?"
"Generally, I don't attempt to produce a certain number of words a day. The discipline is to work whether you are producing a lot or not, because the day you produce a lot is not necessarily the day you do your best work. So it's trying to do it as regularly as you can without making it - without imposing too rigid a timetable on your self. That would be my ideal."
"At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn't too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be."
"It would have been very alarming - morally, and in other ways too - if an attack of that nature, the 11 September attacks, had not aroused in us and in our governments and societies the spirit of self-defence. If that had not been one of the responses it seems to me there would have been very grave cause for concern."
"I think I write in a fairly self-confident manner."
"If you think all this is going on, all these gigantic fields of gravity and light with you in mind, then you really do have a self-centredness problem."
"If we have free will, by definition we cannot be granted it. We can't be given it. My [-audio-recording-distorted-] paradox states that 'Of course we have free will, we have no choice.' To say that it's a gift is to negate the whole concept of free will on its face. So, if that isn't self-evident, I can't think of anything that would meet the definition of being self-evident."
"At the gym, men are just as self conscious and check themselves out in the mirror just as much as women do. In regards to cooking, men can do more than BBQ. All you need to do is ask—but be sure to do it after the game! Oh, and, men do like salads, especially if they are topped off with bacon!"
"The minds that rise and become really great are never self-satisfied, but still continue to strive."
"I do believe in self-help."
"There's not a woman in the world who hasn't felt self-conscious about something! We as women all experience it but we never talk about it."
"The self-surmounter can never put up with the man who has ceased to be dissatisfied with himself."
"New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy."
"To put off the inevitable, we try to fix the city in place, remember it as it was, doing to the city what we would never allow to be done to ourselves. . . . New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy."
"The amazing thing is that chaotic systems don't always stay chaotic," Ben said, leaning on the gate. "Sometimes they spontaneously reorganize themselves into an orderly structure." "They suddenly become less chaotic?" I said, wishing that would happen at HiTek. "No, that's the thing. They become more and more chaotic until they reach some sort of chaotic critical mass. When that happens, they spontaneously reorganize themselves at a higher equilibrium level. It's called self-organized criticality."
"For in this walk, this voyage, it is yourself, the profound history of your 'self,' that now as always you encounter."
"One is least sure of one's self, sometimes, when one is most positive."
"Love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with."
