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, also, would like to look and smile, sit and walk like that, so free, so worthy, so restrained, so candid, so childlike and mysterious. A man only looks and walks like that when he has conquered his Self. I also will conquer my Self."
"One must find the source within one's own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking -- a detour, an error."
"I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive."
"What is important is to keep our mind high in the world of true understanding, and returning to the world of our daily experience to seek therein the truth of beauty. No matter what we may be doing at a given moment, we must not forget that is has a bearing upon our everlasting self which is poetry."
"I think the more we know the better we are. I mean not just facts. The more we know about each other, the closer we are to learn something about our selves."
"In my youth I studied for ostentation; later, a little to gain wisdom; now, for recreation; never for gain."
"We learn to be right and to make everyone else wrong. The need to be right is the result of trying to protects the image we want to project to the outside. We have to impose our way of thinking, not just onto other humans, but even upon ourselves."
"I am not worthy of my suffering. A great sentence. It suggests not only that suffering is the basis of the self, its sole indubitable ontological proof, but also that it is the one feeling most worthy of respect; the value of all values."
"Work that is pure toil, done solely for the sake of the money it earns, is also sheer drudgery because it is stultifying rather than self improving."
"It is the nature of the self to manifest itself, In every atom slumbers the might of the self."
"The way to plan the family is natural family planning, not contraception...This (use of contraceptives) turns the attention to self and so it destroys the gift of love in him or her. In loving, the husband and wife must turn the attention to each other as happens in natural family planning, and not to self, as happens in contraception. Once that living love is destroyed by contraception, abortion follows easily . . . And abortion, which often follows from contraception, brings a people to be spiritually poor, and that is the worst poverty and the most difficult to overcome."
"Sometimes it would be nice to just have some red wine with dinner, but it's not worth the risk. I have a great life, a great situation. Why would I want to risk self-destructive behaviour?"
"None are so desolate but something dear, Dearer than self, possesses or possess'd A thought, and claims the homage of a tear."
"Don't worry about your father. He's a perfectly contented, self-sufficient zombie."
"Selfishness and self-absorption are deadly charm-exterminators."
"When we forgive and let go, not only does a huge weight drop off your shoulders, but the doorway to your own self-love opens."
"The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with the psychological properties, but the metaphysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world."
"One must not hold one's self so divine as to be unwilling occasionally to make improvements in one's creations."
"There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty - in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub - our immediate duty is to stop it."
"The true self is not aware that it is a self. A bird, as it sings, sings itself. But not according to a picture. It has no idea of itself."
