Self Quotes - Page 453

If you want a referendum, vote for the others. Or, in certain cases, you can stay at home, you don't vote and you could find yourself with a referendum by default because you didn't exercise your vote.

Inspiration? - a hoax fabricated by poets for their self-importance.

When we get to the point where a gay pro athlete is no longer forced to live in fear that he'll be shunned by teammates or outed by tabloids, when we get to the point where he plays while his significant other waits in the family room, when we get to the point where he's not compelled to hide his true self and is able to live an authentic life, then coming out won't be such a big deal. But we're not there yet.

Getting married has shifted my focus, in such a profound way. You just realize, "Oh, I can't be so selfish anymore. There's someone else."

If we allow our self-congratulatory adoration of technology to distract us from our own contact with each other, then somehow the original agenda has been lost.

Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.

The transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist feeds off woman’s true energy source, i.e. her woman-identified self. It is he who recognises that if female spirit, mind, creativity and sexuality exist anywhere in a powerful way it is here, among lesbian-feminists.

Writing mirrors the interior self. You know, any book is like the perfect blueprint of the psyche of the author.

Listen, young people, I understand narcissism - clearly. But at least I have the decency to hate myself. And that's what's missing from the young people. They don't have the debilitating self-loathing and the second guessing.

In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.

Self-love leads men of narrow minds to measure all mankind by their own capacity.

I think that may be the biggest difference between Americans and people elsewhere. Unlike Americans, Canadians know that there are places just as real as Canada. It's a self-centeredness that's a very strange thing.

The secret of understanding poetry is to hear poetry's words as what they are: the full self's most intimate speech, half waking, half dream. You listen to a poem as you might listen to someone you love who tells you their truest day. Their words might weep, joke, whirl, leap. What's unspoken in the words will still be heard. It's also the way we listen to music: You don't look for extractable meaning, but to be moved.

Self-expression is not enough; experiment is not enough; the recording of special moments or cases is not enough. All of the artshave broken faith or lost connection with their origin and function. They have ceased to be concerned with the legitimate and permanent material of art.

To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation.

It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come.

[Travel seems] not just a way of having a good time, but something that every self-respecting citizen ought to undertake, like a high-fiber diet, say, or a deodorant.

I was doing a children's book on self-esteem, and I really felt like I wanted to shed the shame I'd been feeling - and maybe make it easier for women my age who had probably felt bad about themselves.

Patrimonial capitalism's legacy is that many people see reform as a euphemism for corruption and self-dealing.

Self-dealing, essentially, occurs when managers run companies to line their own pockets instead of those of the companies' owners. It's been a perennial problem in American capitalism and became a real dilemma when America moved toward a model in which corporations would be run by professional managers who had only small ownership stakes.

There is no self-delusion more fatal than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is groveling and sensual

The self-regulating mechanism of the market place cannot always be depended upon to produce adequate results in scientific research.

I felt like a Tinker toy kid building my own self out of one of those toy building sets; for as she laid her life before me, I reassembled the tableau of her words like a picture puzzle, and as I did, so my own life was rebuilt.

We can neither change nor overpower God's eternal suffrage against selfishness and meanness.

If we listen to our self-love, we shall estimate our lot less by what it is than by what it is not; shall dwell upon its hindrances and be blind to its possibilities; and, comparing it only with imaginary lives, shall indulge in flattering dreams of what we should do if we had but power, and give if we had but wealth, and be if we had no temptations.