Self Quotes - Page 28

Why should I take my clothes off (...) when there are, already, so many other woman doing it for me?

We all get to discover who we really are at some point, and when we do, it can be quite unsettling.

These ideas fit the experience of these Japanese women who often talked about searching for or trying to develop "self" (jibun). Cultivating or polishing self by doing tea ceremony or being a good mother, for example, had a good connotation for the Japanese because it meant that you were trying to go beyond your narrow self and connect self with the larger world beyond social norms. But developing self in the new way these women used it meant to develop self according to just what you want to do or in a way that enhances your own possibilities in the world. Would others see choosing a life for self as selfish? These women had to maintain some ambiguity because they were wandering into dangerous territory when they wanted to travel just to enjoy themselves, or keep working and not marry. In a society that honored the cultivation of a larger self, would they themselves someday suffer for having chosen the self-centered way?

Nancy Ross Rosenberger

The thing that I’m most likely to collapse under is not the weight of the stresses that stand around me, but the ego that sits within me.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Sometimes one must become something one fears or loathes in order for the greater self to survive.

Alex Lamb

We lavish more attention onto our past, after its done, than in the making of it. as a result; "What is done" and "Could have been" becomes ruthless killers lurking in the darkness of our consciousness.

Efrat Cybulkiewicz

It is often by a trivial, even an anecdotal decision, that we direct our activities into a certain channel, and thus determine which of the potential expressions of our individuality become manifest. Usually we know nothing of the ultimate orientation or of the outlet toward which we travel, and the stream sweeps us to a formula of life from which there is no returning. Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be.

René Dubos

Humans have invented all kinds of symbols to communicate not only with other humans but more importantly with ourselves.

José Luis Ruiz

We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls...

Gregory Maguire

Why were there no words that spoke positively about being concerned about the self? Why was there only negative connotation in terms like "selfish", "self-interested", "self-centred", "self-obsessed" and so on? Why was it so much better to be without a self: "selfless", "self-sacrificing", "self-effacing", etc?

A.J. Dalton

[T]he Enneagram is, at its most abstract, a universal mandala of the self—a symbol of each of us.

Don Richard Riso

Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.

Jonathan Lethem

You only exist because of the agreements you made with yourself and with the other humans around you.

José Luis Ruiz

Poor Father, I see his final exploration. He arrives at the new place, his hair risen in astonishment, his mouth and eyes dumb. His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his arms spread in pantomimic celebration, the immigrant, as in every moment of his life, arriving eternally on the shore of his Self.

E.L.Doctorow

... telling herself stories about herself in a singsong voice, creating her own mythology.

Abraham Verghese

I closed my eyes, tried to get as far away from myself as I could.

Catherine Lacey

You can't betray yourself too often, or you become somebody else.

Ed Harris

She filled herself entirely with the molten dark.

Gertrud Kolmar

Who you are is too vast to be captured by the reflection of a mirror, classified by the state of your attitude, or categorized by the opinions of others. Therefore, if any of these are defining you, you have yet to be defined.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

...the other's self, that enormous hulking thing each possessed, that a self of course is not inconsequential. p124

Jane Hamilton

Look for love in the most likely places, the places you love to visit and like to stay on for some more time. Just be your natural self- the real you- and believe me love will come waltzing in to the tune of your favourite song.

Latika Teotia

The one who loves you has the right to tick you off, to correct you when you go wrong and admonish you when you repeat.

Latika Teotia

Is there any escaping the junkshop of the self?

Ali Smith

If you are free to be yourself, You would love to be yourself.

Mahrukh

Make an attempt to know yourself out of your comfort zone, you will see how how amazing you are.

Mahrukh

You do it best, when you put your true color in it.

Mahrukh

It isn't until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are - not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit within - that you can begin to take control.

Oprah Winfrey

Why is erasing desire seen as so important? If the subjugation of the self is the point of the self what's the point in having a self? It's like someone handing you a leaflet which says throw this leaflet away.

Tibor Fischer

It was one of those moments—which sometimes occur only at the interval of years—when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind's eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself as he did now.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds.

Henry David Thoreau

What will you do with your self? Many men and women are still in darkness, trying to figure out the meaning and purpose of life. But no matter what you try to do with your self— whether you deny it, obliterate it, annihilate it, accept it or express it—believe me, it is still alive and kicking.

K.P. Yohannan

Without Psychological Evolution there cannot be any form of revolution. The self is constantly changing. Be involved, be evolved, be revolutionized as lucent and fresh as the new wave hitting at the shore. Become the Sea of Changes. It starts from within.

Grigoris Deoudis

None of us just pop into the world fully formed, so it's the little facts that make us.

Thomm Quackenbush

[…] nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt. But perhaps it becomes a duty to abandon the stock of time that one carries within oneself, to discard it in favour of the present, so that one’s embrace may be turned outwards to the world in which one has made one’s home.

Anita Brookner

I killed the Google Alert I used to have on myself two years ago. I don’t need any more information about myself. I get more than enough of that just by being me.

Lev Grossman

There are days when that dark face is something I can think of as a friend – a primal energy that carries me forward when nothing else will – but more often than not I am face-to-face with a stranger, a companion to something I recognise as myself, sure enough, but one who knows more than I do, thinks less of danger and propriety than I ever have or will, feels a cool and amused contempt for the rules and rituals by which I live, the duties I too readily accept, the compromises I too willingly allow (p. 262)

John Burnside

I don't believe anyone who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.

Graham Greene

I tell you I can't be bothered with things like that. I've got a soul above buttons.

George Orwell

But I will confess  that I began as an astronomer—a liking for bright flashes, vast distances, unreachable things, a hand stretched always toward the furthest limit— and that my longing for you has not taken me very far from that original desire to inscribe a comet’s orbit around the walls of our city, to gently stroke the surface of the stars.

Troy Jollimore

Henry: I usen't to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished any of them, I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever. (Pause.)

Samuel Beckett

As long as a self is driven by an id to a Thou, it is not a matter of love, either. In love the self is not driven by the id, but rather the self chooses the Thou.

Viktor E. Frankl

This was all of it, no doubt, the strange passing feeling that had come to me in the boat. Age. Vanity. The impossibility of accepting the new versions of oneself that life kept offering. The impossibility of the old version’s vanishing.

Sue Miller

Most of the tools from medieval times were extensions of the physical self. Tools are now extensions of the mental self.

Lotoya Peterson

Great mysteries inhabit the threshold of my being.

Fernando Pessoa

For a moment the radio wavered between stationsand I was so busymaking myself marvelous.

S. Jane Sloat

We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.

Charles Taylor

I'm quite aware of my differences. I wouldn't classify them as weird

Sherman Alexie

I know about me. I am the moons sister, a tidal child stranded on land. The sea always in my ear, a surf of eternal discontent in my blood.

Keri Hulme

I suppose it is possible to be all of these things. To sort of fall out of who you are into another, as well as to journey back to some essential sense of self. We only see what we see.He was whatever he needed to be, what we asked him to be. Perhaps there are lives like that—they pour into whatever space we have made ready for them to fill.

Lloyd Jones

The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit - not a part of the world.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

In the night, I am kept awake by the endless chatter of my inner self. I hear it speak softly of old hurts and fondly of past loves, while its demands and anxieties resound throughout me in multitudes.I could be calm and composed all day long, but the moment it is dark, my mind riots.

Beau Taplin

But suppose your dæmon settles in a shape you don't like?Well, then, you're discontented, en't you? There's plenty of folk as'd like to have a lion as a dæmon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they're going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is.But it didn't seem to Lyra that she would ever grow up.

Philip Pullman

I have to admit it humbly, mon cher compatriote, I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be heard in everything I said. I could never talk without boasting, especially if I did so with that shattering discretion that was my specialty. It is quite true that I always lived free and powerful. I simply felt released in the regard to all the for the excellent reason that I recognized no equals. I always considered myself more intelligent than everyone else, as I’ve told you, but also more sensitive and more skillful, a crack shot, an incomparable driver, a better lover. Even in the fields in which it was easy for me to verify my inferiority–like tennis, for instance, in which I was but a passable partner–it was hard for me not to think that, with a little time and practice, I would surpass the best players. I admitted only superiorities in me and this explained my good will and serenity. When I was concerned with others, I was so out of pure condescension, in utter freedom, and all the credit went to me: my self-esteem would go up a degree.

Albert Camus

Life can be awkward at times. It is part of the growing process.

Jim Fargiano

If everybody spent enough time worrying about their own goddamn selves, no one would have to worry about anyone else.

Don De Grazia

[M]y discovering my own identity doesn't mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others.

Charles Taylor

When I loved myself enough, I would sometimes wake in the night to music playing within me.

Kim McMillen

We are, at least in part, who we remember ourselves to be. Take away our memories, and you take away our selves.

Beth Revis

As long as you were comfortable with yourself and believed in yourself, then you could just throw out all that nonsense of worrying about your status and "success" and other people's opinions.

James Collins

The only thing you really have to prove is yourself.

Tadahiko Nagao

Previous 1 … 26 27 28 29 30 … 48 Next

Self Quotes - Page 28

Related Topics