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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"Our problems and pain are universal and increasing, and the solutions to the problems are and always will be based upon universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to every enduring, prospering society throughout history."
"Keeping a personal journal a daily in-depth analysis and evaluation of your experiences is a high-leverage activity that increases self-awareness and enhances all the endowments and the synergy among them."
"Through it all I have learned that parenting is basically a life of self sacrifice."
"If you are an effective manager of your self, your discipline comes from within; it is a function of your independent will."
"But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective scientific method, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology."
"Before Kuhn, most scientists followed the place-a-stone-in-the-bright-temple-of-knowledge tradition, and would have told you that they hoped, above all, to lay many of the bricks, perhaps even the keystone, of truth's temple. Now most scientists of vision hope to foment revolution. We are, therefore, awash in revolutions, most self-proclaimed."
"Heydrich, Eichmann, and company therefore invoke the usual trick of argument for breaking a true continuum that lacks a compelling point for separation: choose an arbitrary dividing line and then treat it as a self-evident law of nature."
"Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance."
"Constant reading will pull you into a place - a mind-set, if you like the phrase - where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness."
"Clear communication between selves - the surface self and the deep self - is the enemy of self-doubt. It slays confusion."
"Self respect beats social approval, every time."
"Truly enlightened people never seek to be like others. Rather, they seek to be superior to their former selves."
"Your life is the one place you have to spend yourself fully - wild - generous, drastic in an unrationed profligacy of self."
"... a phallocentric culture is more likely to begin its censorship purges with books on pelvic self-examination for women or bookscontaining lyrical paeans to lesbianism than with See Him Tear and Kill Her or similar Mickey-Spillanesque titles."
"Challenge serves beautifully to introduce you to your best - and most brilliant - self."
"Self knowledge is the stepping stop to self mastery."
"An excuse is the tool our weak self uses to prevent our strongest self from reaching greatness."
"The most fully actualized people that I studied over ten years consistently pushed the envelope. These people consistently demanded far more of themselves every day than anyone else ever expected from them. These people raised their standards and committed themselves from their hearts to be the best they could be and to live a life of uncommon wonder. This is what self-mastery is all about."
"I was not self-destructive, though I almost destroyed myself. In the end, I turned away from stand-up with a tired swivel of my head..."
"A remarkable memoir that's packed with anecdotes, advice and humor, all while maintaining a high level of dignity and self-awareness."
