Self Quotes

This above all to thine own self be true.

William Shakespeare

Josh Billings said, It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems.

John W. Gardne

To conquer others is to have power, to conquer yourself is to know the way.

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Defining consultancy is a bit like defining the upper class every possible candidate draws the line just below himself.

John Peet

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself and can never be erased.

Alexander Hamilton

Nature herself has never attempted to effect great changes rapidly.

Quintilian

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self - Interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self - Love, and never talk to them of our own neccessities but of their advantages.

Adam Smith

You give little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.

Kahlil Gibran

I believe that what woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I know all except myself.

Francois Villon, Ballade des Menus Propres

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

George Bernard Shaw

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

There is nothing like returing to a place that remains uncganged to find how you yourself have altered.

Nelson Mandela

I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time.

Anna Freud

The name of peace is sweet, and the thing itself is beneficial, but there is a great difference between peace and servitude. Peace is freedom in tranquillity, servitude is the worst of all evils, to be resisted not only by war, but even by death.

Cicero

No book has yet been written in praise of a woman who let her husband and children starve or suffer while she invented even the most useful things, or wrote books, or expressed herself in art, or evolved philosophic systems.

Anna Garlin Spence

In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves... self - Discipline with all of them came first.

Harry S Truman

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.

Immanuel Kant, CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

William Shakespeare, "As You Like It", Act 5 scene 1

Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.

Lois McMaster Bujold, "A Civil Campaign", 1999

Of course life is bizarre, the more bizarre it gets, the more interesting it is. The only way to approach it is to make yourself some popcorn and enjoy the show.

David Gerrold

There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

I have a prejudice against people who print things in a foreign language and add no translation. When I am the reader, and the other considers me able to do the translating myself, he pays me the quite a nice compliment - - But if he would do the translating for me I would try to get along without the compliment. A Tramp Abroad, 1880.

Mark Twain

Nothing in life is as good as the marriage of true minds between man and woman. As good? It is life itself.

Pearl S. Buck

Eliminating what is not wanted or needed is profitable in itself.

Philip Crosby, Reflections on Quality

Be more splendid, more extraordinary. Use every moment to fill yourself up.

Oprah Winfrey, O Magazine, February 2003

Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer into a selflessness which links us with all humanity.

Lady Nancy Asto

Never do anything yourself that others can do for you.

Agatha Christie

You must be willing to protect yourself and what you cherish, no matter what the cost.

Christopher Paolini, Author of Eragon and Eldest. Quote from Eragon.

If it come to prohibiting, there is aught more likely to be prohibited than truth itself.

John Milton

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.

Walt Whitman

This coffee plunges into the stomach... the mind is aroused, and ideas pour forth like the battalions of the Grand Army on the field of battle.... Memories charge at full gallop... the light cavalry of comparisons deploys itself magnificently; the artillery of logic hurry in with their train of ammunition; flashes of wit pop up like sharp - Shooters.

Honore de Balzac

I hate mankind, for I think myself to be one of them, and I know how bad I am.

Samuel Johnson

Do definite good first of all to yourself, then to definite persons.

John Lancaster Spalding

The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish.

Pope John Paul II

Practice yourself what you preach.

Titus Maccius Plautus, Asinaria

Above all things, reverence yourself.

Pythagoras