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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"If you're not allowed to experiment anymore for fear of being considered self-indulgent or pretentious or what have you, then everyone's going to just stick to the rules - there's not going to be any additional ideas."
"Pessimism is not only unwarranted, it is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think the cause is lost, it will be. No one works hard for a cause they think will lose."
"Self-determination could mean independence, confederacy, federal and autonomy."
"To sleep with a woman: it can seem of the utmost importance in your mind, or then again it can seem like nothing much at all. Which only goes to say that there's sex as therapy (self-therapy, that is) and there's sex as pastime."
"The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices."
"The passions possess a certain injustice and self interest which makes it dangerous to follow them, and in reality we should distrust them even when they appear most trustworthy."
"Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love."
"I came to office with one deliberate intent: to change Britain from a dependent to a self-reliant society - from a give-it-to-me, to a do-it-yourself nation. A get-up-and-go, instead of a sit-back-and-wait-for-it Britain."
"If you're reading it in a book, folks, it ain't self-help. It's help."
"The idea of duty--that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self--is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life."
"The hopes of the Republic cannot forever tolerate either undeserved poverty or self-serving wealth."
"Seas of blood have been shed for the sake of patriotism. One would expect the harm and irrationality of patriotism to be self-evident to everyone. But the surprising fact is that cultured and learned people not only do not notice the harm and stupidity of patriotism, they resist every unveiling of it with the greatest obstinacy and passion (with no rational grounds), and continue to praise it as beneficent and elevating."
"Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp."
"Optimism has always seemed to me the cunning alibi of egoists, anxious to cover up their state of chronic self-satisfaction. They are optimists in order to avoid pitying other men and their misfortune. ~~ Yet pity is a vexed question."
"French intellectual life has, in my opinion, been turned into something cheap and meretricious by the 'star' system. It is like Hollywood. Thus we go from one absurdity to another - Stalinism, existentialism. Lacan, Derrida - some of them obscene ( Stalinism), some simply infantile and ridiculous ( Lacan, Derrida). What is striking, however, is the pomposity and self-importance, at each stage."
"If you want to find weapons of destruction, you can find them all over the place. Take, say, Israel. There is a very great concern right now about proliferation of nuclear weapons, as there should be. Israel has a couple of hundred nuclear weapons and also chemical and biological weapons. This stockpile is not only a threat in itself but encourages others to proliferate in reaction and in self-defense. Is anybody saying anything about this?"
"For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms and did my duty faithfully, though I never received payment for it."
"Self-Made Men are the men who owe little or nothing to birth, relationship, friendly surroundings; to wealth inherited or to early approved means of education; who are what they are, without the aid of any favoring conditions by which other men usually rise in the world and achieve great results."
"The anorexic is the fuse nakedly exposed to the direct power of modern media, a psyche whose wiring has no insulation. The anorexic is an analog to the ideologue, who is likewise devoid of common sense, independent ego, culture, intuitive intelligence, etc.: all the ideologue has to orient himself by is the formalist or abstractivist directives inlaid in modern mass-culture. Both are forms of the True Believer, minds in whom factors of self-active life are reduced to negligibility and pathos reigns."
"As buoyancy is not contrary to other characteristics of leadership, including decisiveness, accountability and performance standards, I don't ever think it can be self-defeating."
