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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"Along with some of the worst music of Bob Dylan's career ("Self-Portrait," 1970), this period produced some gems - including many songs recorded with The Band in '67 but not released until years later."
"I'm not much interested in my own self when I write. I'm interested in what I observe out there, what's going on around me."
"This is not a time to quail, it is not a crisis, nor should we see it as an excuse for wobbling or self-doubt. But it is a moment for hope..."
"I had a lot of self-confidence."
"Well for me, courage means having the courage to walk off the edge of what is known, with complete faith that you're not going to go crashing to the bottom. Stepping outside of your own self-perceived boundaries and limitations."
"Perhaps the greatest display of self-discipline is persisting when the going gets tough. Persistence is self-discipline in action."
"If you're up there [on stage] thinking about what you're doing, you're just not there and it's not going to happen.So trying to learn how to overcome those - which is a normal thing to do. You're in front of a lot of people. People are going to get very self-conscious. So you have to learn to sort of overcome that tendency towards self-consciousness and just blow it wide open. And you jump in and join all those people that are out there enjoying what you're doing together."
"Work creates an enormous sense of self and I saw that in my mother. She was an enormous, towering figure to me in the best possible way. I picked up a lot of things from her in the way that I work... I also picked up a lot of the failings of when your father doesn't have those things and that results in a house that turns into a minefield."
"When I was in my early forties, I slept with a loaded gun under my bed. Id become severely depressed in my thirties, and for almost a decade I spiraled down into paranoia, rage, self-loathing, and thoughts of suicide."
"I'm still a researcher. The best way to explain it is that I trusted myself deeply as a professional, but I did not have a lot of self-trust personally. When I started learning all of these things about the value and the importance of belonging, vulnerability, connection, self-kindness and self-compassion, I trusted what I was learning - again, I know I'm a good researcher. When those things and wholeheartedness started to emerge with all these different properties, I knew I had to listen. I'd heard these messages before personally but I didn't trust myself there."
"Shame works like the zoom lens on a camera. When we are feeling shame, the camera is zoomed in tight and all we see is our flawed selves, alone and struggling.(page 68)"
"We can only belong when we offer our most authentic selves and when we're embraced for who we are."
"I came from a state where 35 percent self-identify as Tea Partiers, so I'm a bit distorted perhaps in my appreciation for the larger American population."
"We try to invest in companies that are putting together environmental programs and working to improve their overall social and environmental self."
"You don't want to go around willy-nilly suing news organizations. That's probably self-defeating."
"Any systems approaching perfect self-control also approaches perfect self-frustration."
"I have no other self than the totality of the things of which I am aware."
"Self-knowledge leads to wonder, and wonder to curiosity and investigation, so that nothing interests people more than people, even if only one's own person."
"Paul Keating told us before we were elected that you can do deals with [Rupert] Murdoch without saying you were doing a deal. Did we do that kind of thing? Maybe. But from around about the turn of the century, I felt strongly that we had to do something about media ownership and self-regulation. Tony [Blair] disagreed."
"Autocratic governments are masters of self-contradiction. They say one thing, do another."
