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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"Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god."
"Self-actualized people are independent of the good opinion of others."
"Let every student enter the school with this advice. No matter how good the school is, his education is in his own hands. All education must be self education."
"Shut your eyes so the heart may become your eye, and with that vision look upon another world. If you can step away from your need for self-approval, all that you do, top to bottom, will be approved."
"Introspection is self-improvement and therefore introspection is self-centeredness. Awareness is not self-improvement. On the contrary, it is the ending of the self, of the “I,” with all its peculiar idiosyncrasies, memories, demands, and pursuits. In introspection there is identification and condemnation. In awareness there is no condemnation or identification; therefore, there is no self-improvement. There is a vast difference between the two."
"I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections. and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill. I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self, and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help and patience, and a certain difficult repentance long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify."
"In Buddhism, ignorance as the root cause of suffering refers to a fundamental misperception of the true nature of the self and all phenomena."
"All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell."
"The mandala is an archetypal image whose occurrence is attested throughout the ages. It signifies the wholeness of the self. This circular image represents the wholeness of the psychic ground or, to put it in mythic terms, the divinity incarnate in man."
"Classic economic theory, based as it is on an inadequate theory of human motivation, could be revolutionized by accepting the reality of higher human needs, including the impulse to self actualization and the love for the highest values."
"There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one's self."
"When we find delight in another person, we've actually found something joyful inside ourselves that involves a shift in our awareness, a shift in our perception, because the same person is not necessarily attractive to other people.In relationship, whenever we're drawn to someone or repelled by someone, they're both mirrors of the self. We're attracted to people in whom we find traits that we want or desire in our own selves. And we are repelled by people in whom we find traits that we're denying in ourselves. So relationship is a true mirror of where we are in our evolution in consciousness."
"If you don't allow for self-serving bias in the conduct of others, you are, again, a fool."
"No one is discontented at not being a king except a discrowned king ... unhappiness almost invariably indicates the existence of a road not taken, a talent undeveloped, a self not recognized."
"Self-doubt does more to sabotage individual potential than all external limitations put together."
"I am more afraid that this people have so much confidence in their leaders that they will not inquire for themselves of God whether they are led by Him. I am fearful they settle down in a state of blind self-security... Let every man and woman know, by the whispering of the Spirit of God to themselves, whether their leaders are walking in the path the Lord dictates, or not."
"Ultimately the greatest help is self-help."
"The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical action."
"There’s only one basic principle of self-defense- you must apply the most effective weapon, as soon as possible, to the most vulnerable target."
"And the more you become aware of the unknown self - if you become aware of it - the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that is."
