Self Quotes - Page 108

This is a matter of freedom. If you don't have many possessions then you don't need to work all your life like a slave to sustain them, and therefore you have more time for yourself.

Early on a difficult climb, especially a solo climb, you’re hyper-aware of the abyss pulling at your back, constantly feeling its call, its immense hunger. To resist takes tremendous conscious effort, you don’t dare let your guard down for an instant. The void puts you on edge, makes your movements tentative and clumsy. But as the climb continues, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used to rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control.

Meditation begins with a call that awakes us out of the coma of self-preoccupation. We are called, we are chosen. Meditation is our response to that call from the deepest center of our awakened consciousness...by letting to in meditation we learn how to love.

Hell, in my opinion, is never finding your true self and never living your own life or knowing who you are.

Our lives are more like fragmentary dreams than the enactments of conscious selves. We control very little of what we most care about; many of our most fateful decisions are made unbeknownst to ourselves. Yet we insist that mankind can achieve what we cannot: conscious mastery of its existence. This is the creed of those who have given up an irrational belief in God for an irrational faith in mankind.

I learned that no man in God's wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man.

Taking into account the public's regrettable lack of taste, it is incumbent upon you not to fit in.

I want to say to you: Help yourself, so you can help someone else.

Love is the doorway through which the human soul passes from selfishness to service.

There are some things about myself I can’t explain to anyone. There are some things I don’t understand at all. I can’t tell what I think about things or what I’m after. I don’t know what my strengths are or what I’m supposed to do about them. But if I start thinking about these things in too much detail the whole thing gets scary. And if I get scared I can only think about myself. I become really self-centered, and without meaning to, I hurt people. So I’m not such a wonderful human being.

Soften my hard self-opinionatedness, which time has hardened so exceedingly!

Heroes come in all sizes, and you don't have to be a giant hero. You can be a very small hero. It's just as important to understand that accepting self-responsibi lity for the things you do, having good manners, caring about other people-these are heroic acts. Everybody has the choice of being a hero or not being a hero every day of their lives.

The sad thing is most people have to check with someone before they do the things that make them happy. We're all passing through; the least we can do is be happy, and the only way to do that is by being selfish.

Along with others, I have tried to pry economists away from narrow assumptions about self interest. Behavior is driven by a much richer set of values and preferences.

In order to understand, I destroyed myself.

...occasionally I wished I could walk through a picture window and have the sharp, broken shards slash me to ribbons so I would finally look like I felt.

I'm just one gigantic ball of rancid fear and self-consciousness. I'm entirely fueled by fear, so the fact that I knew it could be a catastrophic disaster made me unable to sleep, and made me work quite hard.

All men are sculptors, constantly chipping away the unwanted parts of their lives, trying to create their idea of their masterpiece.

No one in this country need go hungry, and alleviating the problem is primarily a matter of readjusting our priorities. In both the government and the private sector, self-interest has displaced the ideal of community that made this country great. The old world view of "us, we, our" has been replaced by "I, me, mine." The reasons for this are manifold and complex, but at the end of the day, we need to remember that, if one of us is suffering needlessly, all of us are diminished.

The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned.

The voice inside your head is not the voice of god. It just sounds like it thinks it is.

Think about it: what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellow men. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.

The experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego.

No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline.

Punishment may make us obey the orders we are given, but at best it will only teach an obedience to authority, not a self-control which enhances our self-respect.