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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"My face, my self, what would they mean to anybody? Just another stiff. So this self of mine passes some other's self on the street - what do we have to say to each other? Hey there! Hi ya!That's about it. Nobody raises a hand. No one turns around to take another look."
"The heart-throb for the welfare of humanity therefore passes into the ravings of an insane self-conceit, into the fury of consciousness to preserve itself from destruction; and it does this by expelling from itself the perversion which it is itself, and by striving to look on it and express it as something else."
"Whatever pretended causes we may blame our afflictions upon, it is often nothing but self-interest and vanity that produce them."
"Self-interest speaks all manner of tongues and plays all manner of parts, even that of disinterestedness."
"The breeding we give young people is ordinarily but an additional self-love, by which we make them have a better opinion of themselves."
"Self-love is more cunning than the most cunning man in the world."
"We do not like to praise, and seldom praise anyone without self-interest."
"Jealousy is always born with love, but does not die with it. In jealousy there is more of self-love than of love to another."
"It is easier to deceive yourself, and to do so unperceived, than to deceive another."
"Loyalty is in most people only a ruse used by self-interest to attract confidence."
"Friendship is only a reciprocal conciliation of interests, and an exchange of good offices; it is a species of commerce out of which self-love always expects to gain something."
"We feel good and ill only in proportion to our self-love."
"Friendship is a traffic wherein self-love always proposes to be the gainer."
"Self-love makes our friends appear more or less deserving in proportion to the delight we take in them, and the measures by whichwe judge of their worth depend upon the manner of their conversing with us."
"Whatever discoveries we may have made in the regions of self-love, there still remain many unknown lands."
"Self-love, as it happens to be well or ill conducted, constitutes virtue and vice."
"Nothing is so capable of diminishing self-love as the observation that we disapprove at one time what we approve at another."
"Self-love is the love of a man's own self, and of everything else for his own sake. It makes people idolaters to themselves, and tyrants to all the world besides."
"Virtues lose themselves in self-interest, as rivers in the sea."
"That good disposition which boasts of being most tender is often stifled by the least urging of self-interest."
