Self Quotes - Page 487

The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places. It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.

Every man is correct in asking God why he is stuck with himself, and his rotten luck.

Oh, the twenties and the thirties were not otherwise designedThan other times when blind men into ditches led the blind,When the rich mouse ate the cheese and the poor mouse got the rind,And man, the self-destroyer, was not lucid in his mind.

The truth is that cupidity, selfishness, envy, malice, lust, vindictiveness, are constant vices of human nature.

That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that's become my enemy because that's what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.

Business demands faith, compels earnestness, requires courage, is honestly selfish, is penalized for mistakes, and is the essence of life.

Self-control is one of the most exhilarating of pleasures.

If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,-- Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

The blessed spirits must be sought within the self which is common to all

We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more visibly and obviously, and in all likelihood more easily and fully than we do, for our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive meditative life, and our education that enlarges the separated, self-moving mind, have made our souls less sensitive.

A thorough: miser must possess considerable strength of character to bear the self-denial imposed by his penuriousness. Equal sacrifices, endured voluntarily in a better cause, would make a saint or a martyr.

A rapper is about being completely true to yourself. Being an actor is about changing who you are.

It's great to be great, but its greater to be human.

Everyone is a self-made man. Only the successful admit it.

Fear is the fear of one's self.

I myself have not met a self‐confessed liberal since the late fifties (and even then it was a tacky thing to admit, like coming from the middle class or the Middle West, those two gloomy seedbeds of talent), yet hardly a day passes that I don't read another attack on the “typical liberal” — as it might be announcing a pest of dinosaurs or a plague of unicorns.

I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century.

Religions, of course, have their own demanding intellectual traditions, as Jesuits and Talmudic scholars might attest.... But, in its less rigorous, popular forms, religion is about as intellectually challenging as the average self-help book. (Like personal development literature, mass market books about spirituality and religion celebrate emotionalism and denigrate reason. They elevate the "truths" of myths and parables over empiricism.) In its more authoritarian forms, religion punishes questioning and rewards gullibility. Faith is not a function of stupidity but a frequent cause of it.

Not just self-restraint, that old killjoy, but communal restraint.

He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.

I don't want to read more into it than there is. I try not to overanalyze anymore, as it tends to make me self-centered. If there is a deeper message in what happened in the last year and a half, I'm not going to look under every rock for it. Just let God be God.

As a holistic being you shatter the illusion of your separateness and reveal your connection to everything. This empowers you in a way that the ego-driven self could never contemplate.

I do a lot of public speaking and presentations and I'll always start with a self-deprecating joke to make everybody feel comfortable with my size because there can be hang-ups and anxieties.

Some can just knock it out and some have to lock themselves in a room and get to a fever pitch of self-loathing before they turn in a first draft. . . . each writer's process is screwed up in its own way.

Think of a crucible as an occasion for real magic, the creation of something more valuable than an alchemist could possibly imagine. In it, the individual is transformed, changed, created anew. He or she grows in ways that change his or her definition of self.