Self Quotes

Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.

George Orwell

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

Marcus Aelius Aurelius

Christmas - - That magic blanket that wraps itself about us, that something so intangible that it is like a fragrance. It may weave a spell of nostalgia. Christmas may be a day of feasting, or of prayer, but always it will be a day of remembrance - - A day in which we think of everything we have ever loved.

Augusta E. Rundell

Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. Equilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to the world. When the world shifts, you shift.

Tom Stoppard

You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. you yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.

Buddha

He who demands mercy and shows none burns the bridges over which he himself must later pass.

Thomas Adams

Practice yourself what you preach.

Titus Maccius Plautus, Asinaria

Human nature is not of itself vicious.

Thomas Paine

I am convinced that the majority of people would be generous from selfish motives, if they had the opportunity.

Charles Dudley Warne

I have just returned from Boston. It is the only sane thing to do if you find yourself up there.

Fred Allen, in a letter to Groucho Marx, 1953

Do pleasant things yourself, but unpleasant things through others.

Baltasar Gracian

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.

Maya Angelou

Opportunity does not knock, it presents itself when you beat down the door.

Kyle Chandle

Before a man can wake up and find himself famous he has to wake up and find himself.

Author Unknown

The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.

Benjamin Franklin

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?

Rabbi Hillel

Nothing happens by itself... it all will come your way, once you understand that you have to make it come your way, by your own exertions.

Ben Stein

There is no greater joy than of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.

Henri Bergson

By these things examine thyself. By whose rules am I acting; in whose name; in whose strength; in whose glory? What faith, humility, self - Denial, and love of God and to man have there been in all my actions?

Jackie Mason

But the truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanaro of the boulevards had died from solitude and want of faith in himself and others.

Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (on the death of Decoud)

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

Nelson Mandela

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.

Brian Aldiss

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; neither do we rejoice therein, because we control our lusts, but contrariwise, because we rejoice therein, we are able to control our lusts.

Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

Sir Winston Churchill

Popularity comes from allowing yourself to be bored by people while pretending to enjoy it.

Karol Newlin

He who despises himself nevertheless esteems himself as a self - Despiser.

Friedrich Nietzsche

There is no other way of guarding oneself against flattery than by letting men understand that they will not offend you by speaking the truth; but when everyone can tell you the truth, you lose their respect.

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

You can either hold yourself up to the unrealistic standards of others, or ignore them and concentrate on being happy with yourself as you are.

J. Jacques, Questionable Content webcomic, #352, 05 - 04 - 05

Pascal keeps your hand tied. C gives you enough rope to hang yourself.

Anon.

Happiness is a sunbeam, Which may pass through a thousand bosoms Without losing a particle of its original ray Nay, when it strikes on a kindred heart, Like the converged light on a mirror, It reflects itself with redoubled brightness. It is not perfected till it is shared.

Jane Porte

Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself.

Rita Mae Brown

Glory is like a circle in the water, Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, Till by broad spreading it disperses to naught.

William Shakespeare

I like less the story that a frog if put in cold water will not bestir itself if that water is heated up slowly and gradually and will in the end let itself be boiled alive, too comfortable with continuity to realize that continuous change at some point may become intolerable and demand a change in behavior.

Charles Handy - The Age of Unreason

That which the dream shows is the shadow of such wisdom as exists in man, even if during his waking state he may know nothing about it... We do not know it because we are fooling away our time with outward and perishing things, and are asleep in regard to that which is real within ourself.

Philipus Aureolus Paracelsus

The soul who meditates on the Self is content to serve the Self and rests satisfied within the Self there remains nothing more for him to accomplish.

Bhagavad Gita

Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.

Kahlil Gibran

To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.

Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi