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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"As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination."
"The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent."
"I value self-discipline, but creating systems that make it next to impossible to misbehave is more reliable than self-control."
"Our society's strong emphasis on dieting and self-image can sometimes lead to eating disorders. We know that more than 5 million Americans suffer from eating disorders, most of them young women."
"All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously."
"When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely."
"Those who condemn the self-righteous for the sake of self-discovery do so with ironic self-righteousness."
"All motivation is self-motivation. Your family, your boss, or your co-workers can try to get your engine going, but until you decide what to accomplish, nothing will happen."
"An act of imagination is an act of self-acceptance."
"But I really believe that when you give people authentic identity, which is what Facebook does, and you can be your real self and connect with real people online, things will change."
"I don't trust a man who talks about ethics when he is picking my pocket. But if he is acting in his own self-interest and says so, I have usually been able to work out some way to do business with him."
"Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect."
"Art is the process of evoking pity and terror, which is not abstract at all but very human. What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudointellectual masturbation . . . whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time."
"This is the miracle of life: that each person who heeds him or herself knows what no scientist can ever know: who he or she is."
"Only one deception is possible in the infinite sense, self-deception."
"God can be seen Even by the poorest fool, But not by the self-styled, God-arguing Intellectual giants."
"The Greatest evils inflicted by man over the face of the Earth are wrought not by the self-seekers, the pleasure lovers, or the merely amoral, but by the fervent devotees of ethical principles."
"It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts."
"Innocent pleasures in moderation can provide relaxation for the body and mind and can foster family and other relationships. But pleasure, per se, offers no deep, lasting satisfaction or sense of fulfillment. The pleasure-centered person, too soon bored with each succeeding level of "fun," constantly cries for more and more. So the next new pleasure has to be bigger and better, more exciting, with a bigger "high." A person in this state becomes almost entirely narcissistic, interpreting all of life in terms of the pleasure it provides to the self here and now."
"Whatever your present situation, I assure you that you are not your habits. You can replace old patterns of self-defeating behavior with new patterns, new habits of the effectiveness, happiness and trust-based relationships."
