958 Self Quotes

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.

A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard. There are some that do either a service or a disservice to man. They do him a service if he is conscious. Otherwise, that has no importance: a man's failures imply judgment, not of circumstances, but of himself.

I just want to live each moment, but it's kind of hard to do that when you are asked to analyze yourself constantly. But it's also good in that you are forced to think about things that you don't ordinarily think about. I think it's strange.

Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.

The good and the bad mix themselves so thoroughly in our thoughts, even in our aspirations, that we must look for excellence rather in overcoming evil than in freeing ourselves from its influence.

To be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious of our own existence.

There is a world which I alone rule, but it ends at my fingertips.

The most exciting place to discover talent is in yourself.

I like who I am, and am puzzled to find that not everybody shares this opinion.

Never underestimate the size and scope of my problems.

You have to look at yourself objectively. Analyze yourself like an instrument. You have to be absolutely frank with yourself. Face your handicaps, don't try to hide them. Instead, develop something else.

People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.

Thy praise or dispraise is to me alike; One doth not stroke me, nor the other strike.

I'm the nicest goddamn dame that ever lived.

People often become actresses because of something they dislike about themselves: They pretend they are someone else.

My earliest memory is of feeling different. My parents told me that I wasn't like other children.

Man is a universe within himself.

I am a writer and always was; being a writer is an integral part of my identity. Being published, being well regarded, is a component of that identity.

Let the spirit out - Discard all thoughts of reward, all hopes of praise and fears of blame, all awareness of one's bodily self. And, finally closing the avenues of sense perception, let the spirit out, as it will.

I liked myself better when I wasn't me.

Anything you see in me is in you. If you want to see a vicious killer, that's who you'll see, do you understand that? If you see me as your brother, that's what I'll be. It all depends on how much love you have. I am you, and when you can admit that, you will be free. I am just a mirror.

I can't judge any of you. I have no malice against you and no ribbons for you. But I think that it is high time that you all start looking at yourselves, and judging the lie that you live in.

I know what's best for me, after all I have been in the Claudette Colbert business longer than anybody.

It matters more what's in a woman's face than what's on it.

I'm a terrible long-term planner.

A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

Thou wouldst be loved? - then let thy heart From its present pathway part not! Being everything which now thou art, Be nothing which thou art not. So with the world thy gentle ways, Thy grace, thy more than beauty, Shall be an endless theme of praise, And love - a simple duty.

Wer mit Ungeheuern kampft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

Nothing on earth consumes a man more quickly than the passion of resentment.

They used us as an excuse to go mad and then blamed it on us. Gandhi says create and preserve the image of your choice. The image of my choice is not Beatle George - those who want that can go and see Wings. Why live in the past? Be here now.

That which is in a man, not that which lies beyond his vision is the main factor in what is about to befall him: the operation upon him is the event.

Men are at war with each other because each man is at war with himself.

We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us - Martins felt the little jab of dispensability.

To write an autobiography of Groucho Marx would be as asinine as to read an autobiography of Groucho Marx.

[To Mrs. Claypool] That woman? You know why I was with her? She reminds me of you. In fact, that's why I'm sitting here with you - because you remind me of you!

I feel [I feel] like an old jerk.

If you write about yourself, the slightest deviation makes you realize instantly that there may be honor among thieves, but you are just a dirty liar.

I'm still a kid. I'm like six years old. But it's just a matter of wanting to get up, it's just a big journey. I felt like when I left home that I was on a journey, and I still am.

Heine says that a true autobiography is almost an impossibility, and that man is bound to lie about himself.

Talk of mysteries! - Think of our life in nature, - daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves.

It would be worth the while to look closely into the eye which has been open and seeing at such hours, and in such solitudes, its dull, yellowish, greenish eye. Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green.

What are the earth and all its interests beside the deep surmise which pierces and scatters them?

A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.

Accept everything about yourself - I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end - no apologies, no regrets.

When I am not desperate, I am worthless.

The tragedy of a man who has found himself out.

I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads of millenniums. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me. Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born.

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

I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.

A fish is like a dish that floats in the sea but is no greater than me.

I am a lie who always speaks the truth.

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.

It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.

Accuracy is vexing to a crowd of would-be fantasizers. Hasn't our age coined the term 'escapism,' when in fact the only way to escape oneself is to allow oneself to be invaded?

For I have been a man, and that means to have been a fighter.

One must be something in order to do something.

Schon war ich auch, und das war mein Verderben.

I am a little world made cunningly Of elements, and an angelic sprite.

Poor intricated soul! Riddling, perplexed, labyrinthical soul!

I wasn't the best kid in the world, but I wasn't an ax murderer, either. (1988)

I don't pretend to be 'Captain Weird', I just do what I do.

Man needs to go outside himself in order to find repose and reveal himself.

Every human being has within him an ideal man, just as every piece of marble contains in a rough state a statue as beautiful as the one that Praxiteles the Greek made of the god Apollo.

Through a marvelous law of natural compensation, he who gives of himself grows, and he who turns inward and lives from small pleasures, is afraid to share them with others, and only thinks avariciously of cultivating his appetites loses his humanity and becomes loneliness itself. He carries in his breast all the dreariness of winter. He becomes in fact and appearance an insect.

To live is to be among men, and to be among men is to struggle, a struggle not only with them but with oneself; with their passions, but also with one's own.

Say nothing good of yourself, you will be distrusted; say nothing bad of yourself, you will be taken at your word.

Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else.

If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.

Living wasn't easy for you, was it? You couldn't enter your own life, but you could be someone else. You weren't you then; you were safe.

I'm not a comedian. I'm Lenny Bruce.

I want to be Lenny Bruce.

Now, I don't want to give you the impression that I'm a great musicologist, but I'm a lot better than what I was described as for a long, long time; you know, people said I only knew three chords when I knew five.

Like a bird on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir I have tried in my way to be free.

When I investigate and when I discover that the forces of the heavens and the planets are within ourselves, then truly I seem to be living among the gods.

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and always will be thousands of princes, but there is only one Beethoven.

Man is the microcosm: I am my world.

I am my world. (The microcosm.) (5.63)

Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself. (p. 34e)

I don't grow up. In me is the small child of my early days.

When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better.

Speak up for yourself, or you'll end up a rug.