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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"The confidence you need is belief in your potential. If you see world-class potential in yourself, you'll put in the effort. If you don't see the potential, you won't put in the effort and you'll wait for the performance, and the performance always follows the belief in self."
"When you start to crack open, don't waste a moment gathering your old self up into something like you knew before. Let your new self splash like sunlight into every dark place and laugh and cry and make sounds you never made & thank all that is holy for the gift."
"Your subconscious mind makes all your words and actions fit a pattern consistent with your self-concept and your innermost beliefs about yourself."
"Satori - in the awakening from a dream. Awakening and self-realization and seeing into one's own being - these are synonymous."
"There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God."
"One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary."
"Self-interest is the most ingenious and persuasive of all the agents that deceive our consciences, while by means of it our unhappy and stubborn prejudices operate in their greatest force."
"When from our better selves we have too long been parted by the hurrying world, and droop. Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired, how gracious, how benign is solitude."
"If only I had more money is the easiest way to postpone the intense self-examination and decision-making necessary to create a life of enjoyment - now and not later."
"The all-embracing vast being which is there behind the play of the universe and with which you will have to identify yourself - for this is your true self."
"Our biggest enemy is our own self-doubt. We really can achieve extraordinary things in our lives. But we sabotage our greatness because of our fear"
"A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and - above all - responsible liberty for every individual that we will become that shining city on a hill."
"The self-discipline of the Social Democracy is not merely the replacement of the authority of bourgeois rulers with the authority of a socialist central committee. The working class will acquire the sense of the new discipline, the freely assumed self-discipline of the Social Democracy, not as a result of the discipline imposed on it by the capitalist state, but by extirpating, to the last root, its old habits of obedience and servility."
"Every theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy that orders experience into the framework it provides."
"Achievable goals are the first step to self improvement."
"Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self. When we don't see the self as self, what do we have to fear?"
"Understand this if nothing else: spiritual freedom and oneness with the Tao are not randomly bestowed gifts, but the rewards of conscious self-transformation and self-evolution."
"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley of ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment."
"It is, let me say, at the very least by no means self-evident that there is more liberty, equality, and fraternity in the world today than there was one thousand years ago. One might arguably suggest that the opposite is true. I seek to paint no idyll of the worlds before historical capitalism. They were worlds of little liberty, little equality, and little fraternity. The only question is whether historical capitalism represented progress in these regards, or regression."
"To be in love is to surpass one's self."
