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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"Laughter... is like a hurricane: once it reaches a certain point, it becomes self-feeding, self-supporting. You laugh not because the jokes are funny but because your own condition is funny."
"It is the business of a general to be serene and inscrutable, impartial and self-controlled."
"A widely held, but rarely articulated, belief in our society is that the ideal self is bold, alpha, gregarious. Introversion is viewed somewhere between disappointment and pathology."
"Self-sacrifice, not self-assertion, is the law of the highest universe."
"That which is nearest is least observed. The Atman is the nearest of the near, therefore the careless and the unsteady mind gets no clue to it. But the person who is alert, calm, self-restrained, and discriminating ignores the external world and, diving more and more into the inner world, realizes the glory of the Atman and becomes great."
"Get away from all books and forms and let your soul see its Self. "We are deluded and maddened by books", Shri Krishna declares."
"There is nothing so high as renunciation of self."
"Perhaps if we could popularise through the techniques of branding and consumerism, a different idea, a different narrative, perhaps the world can change. After all it changes constantly and incessantly, it's just the perceptions that we have are governed by people with self-interest and are not inalignment with the health and safety of us as individuals or as a planet."
"Too-lateness, I realized, has nothing to do with age. It’s a relation of self to the moment. Or not, depending on the person and the moment. Perhaps there even comes a time when it’s no longer too late for anything. Perhaps, even, most times are too early for most things, and most of life has to go by before it’s time for almost anything and too late for almost nothing. Nothing to lose, the present moment to gain, the integration with long-delayed Now."
"Humble yourself, you’ll grow greater than the world.Your Self will be revealed to you, without you."
"By God, when you see your beauty you will be the idol of yourself."
"The fundamentalist believer is mostly a weird intellectual who often lacks real faith altogether. As a self-appointed attorney for God, who is in no need of attorneys, he very easily turns out to be more godless than the agnostic and the unbeliever. At all events, he seems deaf to poetry."
"Self-confidenc e alone is security. Your ability is your security. There is no security but you."
"Patriotism has become a mere national self assertion, a sentimentality of flag-cheering with no constructive duties."
"It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned."
"Self-defense...is the only honourable course where there is unreadiness for self-immolation."
"Truth quenches untruth, love quenches anger, self-suffering quenches violence. This eternal rule is a rule not for saints only but for all."
"Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being."
"There is always a limit to self-indulgence, but none to self-restraint."
"For a firm believer in swadeshi, there need be no Pharisaical self-satisfaction in wearing khadi."
