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 think Hollywood is incredibly segregated. I've never seen any place like it. The gatekeepers who are the most progressive activists inspired to make the world better... they're better people, right? They're segregated. It's self segregated in some cases, but there's nobody Black in charge of anything in Hollywood."
"Compassion is the ultimate expression of your highest self"
"Like a lot of people, I've got a self-loathing streak that's alive and well. It acts as a de facto engine when I'm working, but it also has its extraordinary pitfalls, too."
"If thou has not seen the devil, look at thine own self."
"I don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion."
"Our thesis is that symbols and myths are an expression of man's unique self-consciousness, his capacity to transcend the immediate concrete situation and see his life in terms of 'the possible,' and that this capacity is one aspect of his experiencing himself as a being having a world."
"The Universe was a silly place at best...but the least likely explanation for it was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that abstract somethings 'just happened' to be atoms that 'just happened' to get together in ways which 'just happened' to look like consistent laws and some configurations 'just happened' to possess self-awareness and that two 'just happened' to be the Man from Mars and a bald-headed old coot with Jubal inside."
"Self sufficiency appears to be a worthy goal, but it's now impossible if you want to actually get anything done. All our productivity, leverage and insight comes from being part of a community, not apart from it. The goal, I think, is to figure out how to become more dependent, not less."
"American culture is often so self-consumed that we often think that our problems are just our problems."
"The organization of self, and all self-aligning principles would be those that I promote."
"In a reality, what we should be doing is having quiet diplomacy with the Russians to convince them that it's in their self-interest to have a more stable Middle East because trade enriches us all."
"All of us are many different people over time. We have our childhood selves, people that we remember, but they're very different to our adult selves and the way that we create our own naratives is not that dissimilar, I think, to how a biographer structures their narrative of a life."
"General anxiety is the bridge between the manic joys of creation, exploration, new revelations, professional acceptance and reward, and the depression of self-critique, professional rejection and stagnation. All are part of the roller coaster ride of an artist's life."
"Artists should be self-aware of their work and their potential places in people's lives and make their decisions accordingly."
"Now, there is something else interesting here, is this thing called self-determinism and pan-determinism. We have found that there is something stands as a barrier between the ability of a person to be self-determined and the condition he is in, and that is willingness to be controlled. As long as a person will resist control, then everything that comes along which threatens to control him can do so; and thus you have aberration. And until he has a total tolerance of control, he cannot be self-determined or pan-determined."
"The only aberration is denial of self."
"And I don't see that popular measures, self-abnegation and democracy have done anything for Man but push him further into the mud. Currently, popularity endorses degraded novels, self-abnegation has filled the Southeast Asian jungles with stone idols and corpses, and democracy has given us inflation and income tax."
"A lot of my music is just self-observation. Like telling you, "Oh man. What did I just do? How much did I just pay for this chain? Why did I do that? Wait a minute." Let me talk about that. Or like, the temptation. Let me talk about that. Let me observe myself."
"Finding out what you’re good at, and doing it to the best of your ability, is the route to self-respect."
"'Harry Potter' gave me back self respect. Harry gave me a job to do that I loved more than anything else."
