Self

In a society that judges self-worth on productivity, it's no wonder we fall prey to the misconception that the more we do, the more we're worth. ~~ Ellen Sue Stern [The Indispensable Woman]

Dissipation is a form of self-sacrifice. The passage from this to other forms of self-sacrifice is not uncommon. Passionate sinning has not infrequently been an apprenticeship to sainthood. ~~ Eric Hoffer

Constancy, far from being a virtue, seems often to be the besetting sin of the human race, daughter of laziness and self-sufficiency, sister of sleep, the cause of most wars and practically all persecutions. ~~ Freya Stark

Creation is a better means of self-expression than possession; it is through creating, not possessing, that life is revealed. ~~ Vida D. Scudder [The Privilege of Age]

I can't begin to indulge in self-pity, because by enumerating and dwelling upon my limitations, I will be digging a hole so deep that I'll never again be able to crawl out of it. ~~ Dean Koontz [Fear Nothing]

A tree never hits an automobile except in self-defense. ~~ Joe Moore

Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world. ~~ Helen Keller

It may be called the Master Passion, the hunger for self-approval. ~~ Mark Twain

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society. ~~ Daniel Webster

The great problem of legislation is, so to organize the civil government of a community … that in the operation of human institutions upon social action, self-love and social may be made the same. ~~ John Quincy Adams

Self-praise is no recommendation, but at least you know it's sincere. ~~ Unattributed

Pride is a fine imitation of self-esteem for those who can't afford the real thing. ~~ Frederic Morton

Self-plagiarism is style. ~~ Alfred Hitchcock

Parents need to fill a child's bucket of self-esteem so high that the rest of the world can't poke enough holes in it to drain it dry. ~~ Alvin Price

Troubles hurt the most
when they prove self-inflicted. ~~ Sophocles

Humor comes from self-confidence. There's an aggressive element to wit. ~~ Rita Mae Brown [Starting from Scratch]

One of the very best of all earthly possessions is self-possession. ~~ George D. Prentice

The aim of the college, for the individual student, is to eliminate the need in his life for the college; the task is to help him become a self-educating man. ~~ C. Wright Mills

Calm self-confidence is as far from conceit as the desire to earn a decent living is remote from greed. ~~ Channing Pollock

Would you hurt a man keenest, strike at his self-love. ~~ Lewis Wallace

A self-made man has no factory guarantee. ~~ Unattributed

Every theory is a self-fulfilling prophecy that orders experience into the framework it provides. ~~ Ruth Hubbard

… a strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, or self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. ~~ Thomas Jefferson

[On Harrison Ford] His intelligence was a disadvantage, because it brought self-criticism, which can be self-defeating. ~~ Walter Beakel

There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification. ~~ Storm Jameson

A man is a kind of inverted thermometer, the bulb uppermost, and the column of self-valuation is all the time going up and down. ~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

I am not so much concerned with the right of everyone to say anything he pleases as I am about our need as self-governing people to learn everything relevant. ~~ John Fitzgerald Kennedy

The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self-mastery. ~~ Reinhold Niebuhr

There is luxury in self-reproach … When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us. ~~ Oscar Wilde

An adolescent is both an impulsive child and a self-starting adult. ~~ Mason Cooley

Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect. ~~ Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

The punters know that the horse named Morality rarely gets past the post, whereas the nag named Self-Interest always runs a good race. ~~ Gough Whitlam

Blessed are they who heal us of self-despisings. Of all services which can be done to man, I know of none more precious. ~~ William Hale White

To talk over a quarrel, with its inevitable accompaniment of self-justification, is too much like handling cobwebs to be very successful. ~~ Margaret Deland

A person who cannot live in society, or does not need to because he is self-sufficient, is either a beast or a god. ~~ Aristotle

The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self-complacent is erroneous -- on the contrary, it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. It is failure that makes people bitter and cruel. ~~ W. Somerset Maugham

A parent's willingness to wait for conversation to develop further amplifies their child's self-worth. ~~ Gary Smalley and John Trent

The amount of satisfaction you get from life depends largely on your own ingenuity, self-sufficiency, and resourcefulness. People who wait around for life to supply their satisfaction usually find boredom instead. ~~ William Menninger

Once you've been launched into parenthood, you'll need all your best skills, self-control, good judgment and patience. But at the same time there is nothing like the thrill and exhilaration that come from watching that bright, cheerful, inquisitive, creative, eccentric, and even goofy child you have raised flourish and shine. That's what keeps you going, and what, in the end, makes it all worthwhile. ~~ Lawrence Balter

Respect your efforts, respect yourself. Self-respect leads to self discipline. When you have both firmly under your belt, that's real power. ~~ Clint Eastwood

Oh, the self-importance of fading stars. Never mind, they will be black holes one day. ~~ Jeffrey Bernard

Each of us has a mental picture of himself, a self-image which governs much of his conduct and outlook. To find life reasonably satisfying you must have a self-image that you can live with. ~~ Dr. Maxwell Maltz

In order to create an alternative an oppressed group must at once shatter the self-reflecting world which encircles it and, at the same time, project its own image into history. ~~ Sheila Rowbotham

Just remember enough never to be vulnerable again: total forgetting could be as self-destructive as complete remembering. ~~ Helen MacInnes

Self-esteem is the most voluble of the emotions. ~~ Frank Moore Colby

We are in a decaying age. Young people no longer respect their parents. They are rude and impatient. They inhabit taverns and have no self-control. ~~ Inscription on a 6,000-year-old Egyptian Tomb

Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men. ~~ E. B. White

If we are to regard ourselves as a grown-up nation -- and anything else will henceforth be mortally dangerous -- then we must, as the Biblical phrase goes, put away childish things; and among these childish things the first to go, in my opinion, should be self-idealization and the search for absolutes in world affairs: for absolute security, absolute amity, absolute harmony. ~~ George F. Kennan

A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favorite form of self-indulgence. ~~ W. Somerset Maugham [The Circle]

Publication is a self-invasion of privacy. ~~ Marshall McLuhan

[On Karen Carpenter:] She was so symbolic of a lot of women in America with bad self-image problems, and that meant her voice had this incredible vulnerability to it … In retrospect, in relation to her life, her lyrics were tragically profound. ~~ Kim Gordon

The world is made for people who aren't cursed with self-awareness. ~~ Susan Sarandon

Let them think I love them more than I do,
Let them think I care, though I go alone,
If it lifts their pride, what is it to me
Who am self-complete as a flower or a stone. ~~ Sara Teasdale

Courage consists of the power of self-recovery. ~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Never feel self-pity, the most destructive emotion there is. How awful to be caught up in the terrible squirrel cage of self. ~~ Millicent Fenwick

Poke any saint deeply enough, and you touch self-interest. ~~ Irving Wallace

Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this. ~~ Doris Lessing

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us. ~~ Van Wyck Brooks

A mark of maturity seems to be the range and extent of one's feeling of self-involvement in abstract ideals. ~~ Gordon Wallport

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography. ~~ Robert Penn Warren

To respect one's work and to do it well, to risk something in life was more important than being a star. To never sell your soul -- to have self-esteem -- to be true -- was most important of all. ~~ Lauren Bacall

There is a price which it is too great to pay for peace, and that price can be put into one word. One cannot pay the price of self-respect. ~~ Woodrow Wilson

It's often said that the reason why we Baby Boomers became so rebellious and scornful of authority is that we were spoiled rotten and thus became obnoxiously self-centered. This is certainly true. But I think another reason, epitomized by the Cuban Missile Crisis, is that we grew up in a world where the highest authorities, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, regularly managed -- with all their covert operations and their coups and their puppet governments and their spy planes and their atomic testing and their eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations -- to get us into very scary situation, and then either told us nothing or lied to us. Eventually, we stopped trusting authorities. (Now, of course, we ARE the authorities, which is truly scary.) ~~ Dave Barry [Dave Barry Turns 50]

Cooking may be as much a means of self-expression as any of the arts. ~~ Fannie Merritt Farmer [The Boston Cooking School Cook Book]

How to get sicker: Think about all the awful things that could happen to you; be depressed, self-pitying, envious, and angry; blame everyone and everything for your illness; go to see lots of different doctors -- run from one to another, spend half your time in waiting rooms, gets lots of conflicting opinions and lots of experimental drugs; and complain about your symptoms to other people who are unhappy and embittered -- reinforce each other's feelings of hopelessness. ~~ Steven James

The teeth of self-pity had gnawed away her essential self. ~~ Willa Gibbs [Seed of Mischief]

Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice. ~~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the nonpharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive, gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality. ~~ John W. Gardner

He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody. ~~ Joseph Heller

Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well being. ~~ John Updike

Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there. ~~ May Sarton

Where there are no tigers, a wildcat is very self-important. ~~ Korean proverb

Self-respect is the root of discipline: the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself. ~~ Abraham J. Heschel

There are a hundred ways to overcome an obstacle and one sure way not to -- self-pity. ~~ Dale Dauten

The surest way to destroy a relationship is for one partner to stand in the way of the other partner's self-fulfillment. ~~ Joe Moore

Youth is not entirely a time of life; it is a state of mind. Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting their ideals. You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair. ~~ Douglas MacArthur

Total freedom is never what one imagines and, in fact, hardly exists. It comes as a shock in life to learn that we usually only exchange one set of restrictions for another. The second set, however, is self-chosen, and therefore easier to accept. ~~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh [Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead]

The ingenuity of self-deception is inexhaustible. ~~ Hannah More

Self-pity comes so naturally to all of us. ~~ Andre Maurois

Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true. ~~ Demosthenes

A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion. ~~ Eric Hoffer

My work will be finished if I succeed in carrying conviction to the human family that every man or woman, however weak in body, is the guardian of his or her self-respect and liberty. ~~ Mohandas K. Gandhi (See Said Who?)

Conscience: self-esteem with a halo. ~~ Irving Layton

As I get older … I become more convinced that good government is not a substitute for self-government. ~~ Dwight Morrow

Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little applied over all your scruples is an absolute necessity! It is to the soul what a good sun block is to the skin during the heat of summer. You can only captain your own soul, and from time to time some smart-ass psychologist will question your ability to do even that. ~~ Stephen King [The Stand]

How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization! ~~ Eric Hoffer

Most acts of assent require far more courage than most acts of protest, since courage is clearly a readiness to risk self-humiliation. ~~ Nigel Dennis

Human service is the highest form of self-interest for the person who serves. ~~ Elbert Hubbard

From so much of this seriously intended pornography there rises, even when it is lewdly or boisterously comic, the acrid smell, unmistakable, of self-dislike. ~~ Storm Jameson

There is something about going to sea. A little bit of discipline, self-discipline and humility are required. ~~ Prince Andrew

Character -- the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life -- is the source from which self-respect springs. ~~ Joan Didion

He is a self-made man, and worships his creator. ~~ John Bright

Self-hypnosis through one's own propaganda is a not infrequent phase of the self-fulfilling prophecy. ~~ Robert Merton

All passions are extinguished with old age; self-love never dies. ~~ Unattributed

Cynicism is the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence. It is the dishonest businessman's substitute for conscience. It is the communicator's substitute, whether he is advertising man or editor or writer, for self-respect. ~~ Russell Lynes

Avoid self-righteousness like the devil -- nothing is so self blinding. ~~ Sir Basil Liddell Hart

When an American says that he loves his country, he … means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect. ~~ Adlai Stevenson

What bothers me about the journalistic tendency to reduce unmanageable reality to self-contained, movie-like little dramas is not just that we falsity when we do this. It is also that we really miss the good story. ~~ Meg Greenfield

The middle-aged, who have lived through their strongest emotions, but are yet in the time when memory is still half passionate and not merely contemplative, should surely be a sort of natural priesthood, whom life has disciplined and consecrated to be the refuge and rescue of early stumblers and victims of self-despair. ~~ George Eliot

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things. ~~ Ray Bradbury

Self-made men are most always apt to be a little too proud of the job. ~~ Josh Billings

Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting. ~~ William Shakespeare [Henry V]

True happiness … is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose. ~~ Helen Keller

He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser. ~~ Susan Sontag

There are few activities so smug as cold-blooded self-appraisal. ~~ Robert Reeves

When a man says he's a self-made man, is he boasting or apologizing? ~~ Unattributed

Americans are, if not the most self-critical, at least the most anxiously self-conscious people in the world, forever concerned about the inadequacy of something or other -- their national morality, their national culture, their national purpose. ~~ Richard Hofstadter

We often choose a friend as we do a mistress -- for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love. ~~ William Hazlitt