Self Quotes

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim.

Graham Greene, Heart of the Matter (1948)

A man is what he is, not what men say he is. His character no man can touch. His character is what he is before his God and his Judge; and only he himself can damage that. His reputations what men say he is. That can be damaged; but reputation is for time, character is for eternity.

John Ballantine Gough

Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.

Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield

But he that is the greatest among you shall be your servant. And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abused and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.

Matthew 2311, 12 Bible

Let a man strive to purify his thoughts. What a man thinketh, that is he this is the eternal mystery. Dwelling within himself with thoughts serene, he will obtain imperishable happiness.

Maitri Upanishads

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

The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

There is an atmosphere of well - Sounding oratory that likes to attach itself to dress clothes. Away with it.

Albert Einstein

I have never seen a wild thing feel sorry for itself. A little bird will fall dead, frozen from a bough, without ever having felt sorry for itself.

D. H. Lawrence

Education must provide the opportunities for self - Fulfillment it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way.

Noam Chomsky

Each bird loves to hear himself sing.

Arapaho Prove

Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer - Say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep - It is on such occasions that my ideas flow best, and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Self - Reverence, self knowledge, self - Control. These three alone lead life to sovereign power.

Lord Tennyson

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

I have lost the half of myself? a soul for which mine was made.

Voltaire

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

Niels Boh

You can be pleased with nothing when you are not pleased with yourself.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

The only difference between a genius and one of common capacity is that the former anticipates and explores what the latter accidentally hits upon; but even the man of genius himself more frequently employs the advantages that chance presents him; it is the lapidary who gives value to the diamond which the peasant has dug up without knowing its value.

Abbe Guillaume Raynal

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore and diverting himself and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell that ordinary while the greater ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Isaac Newton

Age is opportunity no less than youth itself.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Would you hurt a man keenest, strike at his self - Love.

Lewis Lew Wallace

The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.

Alan Ashley - Pitt

I am prejudiced in favor of him who, without impudence, can ask boldly. He has faith in humanity, and faith in himself. No one who is not accustomed to giving grandly can ask nobly and with boldness.

Johann Kaspar Lavate

Graham See what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you Are you the kind that sees signs, sees miracles Or do you believe that people just get lucky Or, look at the question this way Is it possible that there are no coincidences.

Signs

I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know that there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.

Albert Camus

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.

Galileo Galilei

Be a friend to thyself, and others will be so too.

Thomas Fulle

Without freedom, no art art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

Albert Camus

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

Franz Kafka

Without trust, words become the hollow sound of a wooden gong. With trust, words become life itself.

John Harold

To believe in God or in a guiding force because someone tells you to is the height of stupidity. We are given senses to receive our information within. With our own eyes we see, and with our own skin we feel. With our intelligence, it is intended that we understand. But each person must puzzle it out for himself or herself.

Sophy Burnham

The creative individual has the capacity to free himself from the web of social pressures in which the rest of us are caught. He is capable of questioning the assumptions that the rest of us accept.

John W. Gardne

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.

Henry James

Benevolence alone will not make a teacher, nor will learning alone do it. The gift of teaching is a peculiar talent, and implies a need and a craving in the teacher himself.

John Jay Chapman

You are the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency, your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end, and remain purely as a means.

Dag Hammarskjold

For no phase of life, whether public or private, whether in business or in the home, whether one is working on what concerns oneself alone or dealing with another, can be without its moral duty; on the discharge of such duties depends all that is morally right, and on their neglect all that is morally wrong in life.

Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Duties I