Self Quotes

If they want me to have mysticism, okay, I’ve got it.I’m a mystic, but only in my body,My soul is simple and doesn’t think.

~ Alberto Caeiro

And remember: you must not overwork your body, or your soul. You must not enslave yourself, as you would not enslave any other person. You must be the custodian of your self.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Know your self package to the core. Never lose the strength of assets, your values, what identifies and separates you, what makes you unique. No, you or I are perfect but we are who we are now and we should continue to move towards that better person God sees us to be.

~ Eveth Colley

Like the medieval cartographers of Europe, who felt one would fall into endless space at the edges of the oceans of their maps, we fear the presumed nothingness of no-self. Fortunately, there have been many spiritual circumnavigators who have returned to tell the tale of the beauty beyond self.

~ Kathleen Dowling Singh

When the self is not engaged in apprehending objects it becomes aware of itself.

~ Walter Terence Stace

A fuller expression of Self comes from the journey for greater wholeness.

~ Kathryn V. White

Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it's impossible to look an ape in the eye and not see oneself. There are other animals with frontally oriented eyes, but none that give you the shock of recognition of the ape's. Looking back at you is not so much an animal but a personality as solid and willful as yourself.

~ Frans De Waal

Shall you live authentically who you are or will you spend your allotted living the life of someone you imagine your self to be?

~ Earl R. Smith Ii

You are still what you think, despite what others think about you!

~ Dr. Vivencio Ballano

That which enables us to know and understand aright in the things of God, must be a living principle of holiness within us.

~ John Smith Jr.

You can be yourself without pursuing yourself. Have you ever seen a dog chase his own tail? He just runs in circles.

~ Criss Jami

During relaxation we drop our guard. Particularly in conversation. Relaxed conversation leads to openness. And in openness we often reveal what should never be revealed.

~ Edward Carey

You can be a really nasty, selfish little jerk when you're scared enough. I was scared enough.

~ Robin Mckinley

You don’t care what anyone thinks about you,’ he said.‘That’s crazy,’ she said. ‘I care what everyone thinks about me.’‘I can’t tell,’ he said. ‘You just seem like yourself, no matter what’s happening around you. My grandmother would say you’re comfortable in your own skin.

~ Rainbow Rowell

Crime begins with God. It will end with man, when he finds God again. Crime is everywhere, in all the fibres and roots of our being. Every minute of the day adds fresh crimes to the calendar, both those which are detected and punished, and those which are not. The criminal hunts down the criminal. The judge condemns the judger. The innocent torture the innocent. Everywhere, in every family, every tribe, every great community, crimes, crimes, crimes. War is clean by comparison. The hangman is a gentle dove by comparison. Attila, Tamerlane, Genghis Khan reckless automatons by comparison. Your father, your darling mother, your sweet sister: do you know the foul crimes they harbor in their breasts? Can you hold the mirror to iniquity when it is close at hand? Have you looked into the labyrinth of your own despicable heart? Have you sometimes envied the thug for his forthrightness? The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you. The source of it is God whom you place outside, above and beyond. Crime is identification, first with God, then with your own image.

~ Henry Miller

Someone who is said to have a big ego is thought to be full of themselves, to lack the ability to listen, to always rush to be at the top of the tree and to think their own ideas are the best.

~ Gyalwa Dokhampa

Because we are made in God's image, in fleeing from a relationship with a loving God, we are also running from being our most authentic selves.

~ Kathleen Norris

i have a body and I am grateful, as I find it to be a very useful instrument for expressing love, strength, flexibility, gracebut, I am not my body...

~ Kate Mullane Robertson

...he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

After a while, you have to be at peace with the fact that you simply are. There is no way to know why.

~ David Levithan

Nothing is the whole story. The self’s curse – and the writer’s.

~ Glen Duncan

There are things you should never give up on like your convictions and ambitions but most importantly…you should never give up on you. Keep making those sacrifices, keep running that race, keep advancing beyond your struggles to your eventual goal. You will deeply value your triumphs, if they’re not handed to you. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is worth having or attaining without labor and toil. So when you’re in your darkest hour and the road seems endless, no matter what, never ever give up on you…because only you will see you through. ~Jason Versey

~ Jason Versey

It's funny, because I had thought, living through those first two months after the night at the lake, that the great crisis was about What I Was or Who I'd Become or What Terrible Thing Was Wrong With Me (and About to Go Wronger) and Why All Was Changed As a Result. But I was still struggling against the idea that all *was* changed.

~ Robin Mckinley

SINK OR SWIM ALERTFolks with low self-esteem will push you under to save their drowning egosKamil Ali

~ Kamil Ali

Personality is a strategy devised by a child. Our true, original self lies under our personality, in the transpersonal ground of our being, at our core.

~ Neal M. Goldsmith

I am proud of (knowing) who I am.

~ Gt Rodrigues

Someone else's vision will never be as good as your own vision of your self. Live and die with it 'cause in the end it’s all you have. Lose it and you lose yourself and everything else. I should have listened to myself.

~ Georgia O'keeffe

He wondered if anyone really ever changed, or if stuff just piled on and on, covering up, but never erasing all the different parts. How deep would you have to dig to find who you started out as?

~ Alex London

Every angel is terrifying.Through the darkness, they move silently...I will go down into death with you.I must go where I must goTo see what I must seeIn that place where no one knows...... This is where love is taking me.You have been leadingMe, angels, in and out of death.I have no idea who you are.Eurydice. Is she nothingOr is she your mirror?I don't know anymore.I am at war.Perhaps that which is given - Being human - Is too hard,And so it is love that brings us,To what cannot be born,To ourselves,And so we must change,Must descend, guided by love, into the unknown.Lovers disappear in each other.Do they disappear forever?Where do they go?

~ Kathy Acker

Love and self are one and the discovery of either is the realization of both

~ Leo Buscaglia

When you understand what you’re truly worth, who is going to be able to make you feel worthless? No one.

~ Toni Sorenson

He (Anwar Sadat) records that he was almost loathe to leave his prison cell because it was there that he realized that real success is success with self. It’s not in having things, but in having mastery, having victory over self.

~ Stephen R. Covey

You want to be loved? Love yourself first and passionately. Forgive yourself readily. Care for every part of you. Only when you love yourself do you have love to give to others.

~ Toni Sorenson

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.

~ John Banville

If originality is a “sense of novelty and freshness” then, in the act of constructing ourselves, originality is not the goal. We construct a self-portrait, relying on existing objects – books, quotes from authors and artists, images, art – that we are more than happy to show off to others for them to use as masturbation material or for the material by which they align themselves. This is the new action painting – the curational archive. The referential self portrait. The portrait of any other artist could be readily used to explain yourself, just reblog it and caption it with “same.” The past consistently becomes the present, not through linear time, but through the constant reconstruction and relabeling of it.

~ Gabby Bess

The goal of privacy is not to protect some stable self from erosion but to create boundaries where this self can emerge, mutate, and stabilize.

~ Evgeny Morozov

A journey through nature is always a road that leads to self-discovery.

~ Toni Sorenson

When I went on anyway, my body began to grow cold, and I thought I was dead. Face pale, my dead self sat down on a bench and began to turn toward my real self, who was watching this hallucination on the screen of the night. My dead self came nearer, just as if it might want to shake hands with my real self. That's when I panicked and tried to run. But my dead self pursued me and finally caught me, entered me and controlled me. I'd felt then just the way I felt now. I felt as if a hole had opened in my head from which consciousness and memory leaked out and in their place the rash crowded in, and a cold like spoiled roast chicken. But that time before, shaking and clinging to the damp bench, I'd told myself, Hey, take a good look, isn't the world still under your feet? I'm on this ground, and on this same ground are trees and grass and ants carrying sand to their nests, little girls chasing rolling balls, and puppies running.

~ Ryū Murakami

And I Said To My Soul, Be LoudMadden me back to an afternoonI carry in menot like a woundbut like a will against a woundGive me again enough manto be the childchoosing my own annihilationsTo make of this severed limba wand to conjurea weapon to shatterdark matter of the dirt daubers' nestsgalaxies of glassWhacking glintsbash-dancing on the cellar's fireI am the sound the sun would makeif the sun could make a soundand the gasp of rotstabbed from the compost's lumpen living deathis meO my life my war in a jarI shake you and shake youand may the best ant winFor I am come a whirlwind of wasted thingsand I will ride this tantrum back to Goduntil my fixed self, my fluorescent selfmy grief–nibbling, unbewildered, wall–to–wall selfwithers in me like a salted slug

~ Christian Wiman

If I say, “I am weak,” I ensure that I stay weak. If I say, “I cannot,” “I’m not the type to,” “I am not able,” then I set up a self-fulfilling prophecy. As I think of myself, so I shall be.

~ Vironika Tugaleva