Self Quotes

Life can be awkward at times. It is part of the growing process.

~ Jim Fargiano

If everybody spent enough time worrying about their own goddamn selves, no one would have to worry about anyone else.

~ Don De Grazia

[M]y discovering my own identity doesn't mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others.

~ Charles Taylor

When I loved myself enough, I would sometimes wake in the night to music playing within me.

~ Kim Mcmillen

We are, at least in part, who we remember ourselves to be. Take away our memories, and you take away our selves.

~ Beth Revis

As long as you were comfortable with yourself and believed in yourself, then you could just throw out all that nonsense of worrying about your status and success and other people's opinions.

~ James Collins

Inevitably, though, there will always be a significant part of the past which can neither be burnt nor banished to the soothing limbo of forgetfulness— myself. I was and still am that same ship which carried me to the new shore, the same vessel containing all the memories and dreams of the child in the brick house with the toy tea set. I am the shore I left behind as well as the home I return to every evening. The voyage cannot proceed without me.

~ Luisa A. Igloria

He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glasses.

~ James Joyce

He liked to get off by himself, a mile or so from camp, and listen to the country, not the men.

~ Larry Mcmurtry

Most of us have nicknames—annoying, endearing, embarrassing.But what about your true

~ Vera Nazarian

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find until after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others do the same.

~ C.s. Lewis

One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, / And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten / million years, / I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.

~ Walt Whitman

It isn't until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are - not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit within - that you can begin to take control.

~ Oprah Winfrey

Why is erasing desire seen as so important? If the subjugation of the self is the point of the self what's the point in having a self? It's like someone handing you a leaflet which says throw this leaflet away.

~ Tibor Fischer

It was one of those moments—which sometimes occur only at the interval of years—when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind's eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself as he did now.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds.

~ Henry David Thoreau

What will you do with your self? Many men and women are still in darkness, trying to figure out the meaning and purpose of life. But no matter what you try to do with your self— whether you deny it, obliterate it, annihilate it, accept it or express it—believe me, it is still alive and kicking.

~ K.p. Yohannan

Without Psychological Evolution there cannot be any form of revolution. The self is constantly changing. Be involved, be evolved, be revolutionized as lucent and fresh as the new wave hitting at the shore. Become the Sea of Changes. It starts from within.

~ Grigoris Deoudis

None of us just pop into the world fully formed, so it's the little facts that make us.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

[…] nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt. But perhaps it becomes a duty to abandon the stock of time that one carries within oneself, to discard it in favour of the present, so that one’s embrace may be turned outwards to the world in which one has made one’s home.

~ Anita Brookner

I killed the Google Alert I used to have on myself two years ago. I don’t need any more information about myself. I get more than enough of that just by being me.

~ Lev Grossman

There are days when that dark face is something I can think of as a friend – a primal energy that carries me forward when nothing else will – but more often than not I am face-to-face with a stranger, a companion to something I recognise as myself, sure enough, but one who knows more than I do, thinks less of danger and propriety than I ever have or will, feels a cool and amused contempt for the rules and rituals by which I live, the duties I too readily accept, the compromises I too willingly allow (p. 262)

~ John Burnside

I don't believe anyone who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.

~ Graham Greene

I tell you I can't be bothered with things like that. I've got a soul above buttons.

~ George Orwell

But I will confess 
that I began as an astronomer—a liking
for bright flashes, vast distances, unreachable things,
a hand stretched always toward the furthest limit—
and that my longing for you has not taken me
very far from that original desire
to inscribe a comet’s orbit around the walls
of our city, to gently stroke the surface of the stars.

~ Troy Jollimore

Henry: I usen't to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished any of them, I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever. (Pause.)

~ Samuel Beckett

As long as a self is driven by an id to a Thou, it is not a matter of love, either. In love the self is not driven by the id, but rather the self chooses the Thou.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

This was all of it, no doubt, the strange passing feeling that had come to me in the boat. Age. Vanity. The impossibility of accepting the new versions of oneself that life kept offering. The impossibility of the old version’s vanishing.

~ Sue Miller

Most of the tools from medieval times were extensions of the physical self. Tools are now extensions of the mental self.

~ Lotoya Peterson

For a moment the radio wavered between stationsand I was so busymaking myself marvelous.

~ S. Jane Sloat

We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.

~ Charles Taylor

It is often by a trivial, even an anecdotal decision, that we direct our activities into a certain channel, and thus determine which of the potential expressions of our individuality become manifest. Usually we know nothing of the ultimate orientation or of the outlet toward which we travel, and the stream sweeps us to a formula of life from which there is no returning. Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be.

~ René Dubos

Humans have invented all kinds of symbols to communicate not only with other humans but more importantly with ourselves.

~ José Luis Ruiz

We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the contradictions, and the lapses, and the abrasions of plot against our mortal souls...

~ Gregory Maguire

[T]he Enneagram is, at its most abstract, a universal mandala of the self—a symbol of each of us.

~ Don Richard Riso

Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.

~ Jonathan Lethem

You only exist because of the agreements you made with yourself and with the other humans around you.

~ José Luis Ruiz

Poor Father, I see his final exploration. He arrives at the new place, his hair risen in astonishment, his mouth and eyes dumb. His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his arms spread in pantomimic celebration, the immigrant, as in every moment of his life, arriving eternally on the shore of his Self.

~ E.l. Doctorow

... telling herself stories about herself in a singsong voice, creating her own mythology.

~ Abraham Verghese

I closed my eyes, tried to get as far away from myself as I could.

~ Catherine Lacey