Self Quotes - Page 303

Prayer gives us relief from the melancholy burden of self-absorption .

I don't judge my self-worth as a football player. Football is something I love. It's a fun career deal, but it's not what I want to do with my life, because I see football as a game.

With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic motives proper.

Life is given for wisdom, and yet we are not wise; for goodness, and we are not good; for overcoming evil, and evil remains; for patience and sympathy and love, and yet we are fretful and hard and weak and selfish. We are keyed not to attainment, but to the struggle toward it.

The true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent.

It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely, without putting his whole self into it, quite unawares, presenting as if in allegory the basic themes and problems of his life.

You can always get someone to love you - even if you have to do it yourself.

Self-love . . . is the sole antagonist of virtue, leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others.

If the perpetual oscillation of nations between anarchy and despotism is to be replaced by the steady march of self-restraining freedom, it will be because men will gradually bring themselves to deal with political, as they now deal with scientific questions.

Do not that to another, which thou wouldst not have done to thyself.

Absurdities die of self-strangulation.

Self-contemplation is infallibly the symptom of disease.

Self-righteousness is the devil's masterpiece to make us think well of ourselves.

In the age of the individual's liquidation, the question of individuality must be raised anew.

The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself.

One of the main tasks of adolescence is to achieve an identity--not necessarily a knowledge of who we are, but a clarification ofthe range of what we might become, a set of self-references by which we can make sense of our responses, and justify our decisions and goals.

The reason that I'm an actor, or an artist, is ultimately because I'm trying to paint a self-portrait, and the most complete and beautiful self-portrait that you can.

Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people's stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.

If they don't like you for being yourself, be yourself even more.

It's important to be self-aware about what people are saying about you, but even more so, be very aware of who you actually are, and to have that be the main priority.

Women particularly can dress modestly and in the process contribute to their own self­ respect and to the moral purity of men. In the end, most women get the type of man they dress for.

I give the niggaz what they came to see, a reflection of one self where they aim to be.

I wish I could write librettos for the rest of my life. It is the purest of human pleasures, a heavenly hermaphroditism of being both writer and musician. No wonder that selfish beast Wagner kept it all to himself.

Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

You have to invest in yourself and your surroundings.