Self: A bud can be beautiful, a work of art even. But I'm finding it simply can't compare to the openness of the blossom. Looking for my sun. ~Jeb Dickerson Self: A criminal becomes a popular figure because he unburdens in no small degree the consciences of his fellow man, for now they know once more where evil is to be found. ~Carl G. Jung Self: A man is ever apt to contemplate himself out of all proportion to his surroundings. ~Christina G. Rossetti Self: A man is sometimes lost in the dust of his own raising. ~David Ruggles Self: A man who finds no satisfaction in himself, seeks for it in vain elsewhere. ~François VI de la Rochefoucault Self: A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour. ~P.G. Wodehouse Self: A wise man never loses anything if he have himself. ~Michel de Montaigne, translated Self: Ah! but the moods lie in his nature, my boy, just as much as his reflections did, and more. A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom. ~George Eliot Self: All men are sculptors, constantly chipping away the unwanted parts of their lives, trying to create their idea of a masterpiece. ~Eddie Murphy, 1979 Self: Almost always it is the fear of being ourselves that brings us to the mirror. ~Antonio Porchia Self: Among navigators there are some who discover worlds, who add new continents to the earth and new constellations to the heavens: they are the masters, eternally splendid. Other belch terror from their vessels' guns and wax rich and fat from their plunder. Still others leave home to seek gold and silk under foreign skies. And still others merely let down their nets to catch salmon for gourmets and cod for the poor. I am the obscure and patient pearl-fisher, who dives deep and comes up empty-handed and blue in the face. A fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down to those innermost recesses that never lose their fascination for the strong. I shall spend my life watching the ocean of art where others are sailing or fighting; and from time to time I'll entertain myself by plunging to the bottom in search of green or yellow shells. No one will want them, so I'll keep them for myself alone, and use them to cover the walls of my hut. ~Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet Self: And remember, no matter where you go, there you are. ~Confucius Self: Anyone can promise the stars. Only you can reach them. ~Dodinsky Self: As the roots of a tree are hidden in the earth, so we may regard the root of our Ego as sunk in a world beyond our consciousness... ~William F. Barrett Self: At some point in my life, I swallowed a Sun. And now it dawns and sets in my belly. ~Erika Harris Self: At the fireside of life in the deep quietude beyond my deserts, I was happy. Faithfully, truth casts his leaves forth upon the wind, but few indulge in revelation to the heart. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne Self: At this very moment, you may be saying to yourself that you have any number of admirable qualities. You are a loyal friend, a caring person, someone who is smart, dependable, fun to be around. That's wonderful, and I'm happy for you, but let me ask you this: are you being any of those things to yourself? ~Phillip C. McGraw Self: Be there for others, but never leave yourself behind. ~Dodinsky Self: Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail. ~John Donne Self: Be useful each day and take control of your own health. Laziness and apathy can settle into your spirit if you aren't paying attention. ~Terri Guillemets Self: Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written. ~Mark Twain Self: Circumstances are moulds in which characters are run. ~James Lendall Basford Self: Daily I learn — sometimes painfully, other times with glee — that mine is a path never meant to be paved. ~Jeb Dickerson Self: Did you really run into a monster on your path, or just a mirror? ~Terri Guillemets Self: Dig within. There lies the well-spring of good: ever dig, and it will ever flow. ~Marcus Aurelius Self: Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book shown to him by heart, and his friends can only read the title. ~Virginia Woolf Self: Each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against ourselves. ~Martin Luther King, Jr. Self: Each one of us is alone in the world... We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. ~W. Somerset Maugham Self: Every day ask yourself, "What would I do today if I were a better person?" ~Robert Brault Self: Every day I go forth to seek my identity, feeling greatly blessed by the things I don't find it in. ~Robert Brault Self: Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions. ~D.H. Lawrence Self: Every man is his own ancestor, and every man his own heir. He devises his own future, and he inherits his own past. ~H.F. Hedge Self: Every morning I start with a drink from my cup of sunshine, to remind myself of who I am before I step into the world of "this is who we think you are." ~Dodinsky Self: Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody. ~Mark Twain Self: Everything that I bear within me bound, is to be found somewhere else free. ~Antonio Porchia Self: Falling, falling, falling, falling down. Look yourself in the eye before you drown. ~Emily Saliers Self: From birth to death every man is weaving destiny around himself, as a spider does his web. ~Helena P. Blavatsky Self: Get involved. You don't want to look back on your life and realize that you successfully managed to stay out of it. ~Robert Brault Self: Grace is within you. If it were external, it would be useless. ~Ramana Maharshi Self: Having perfected our disguise, we spend our lives searching for someone we don't fool. ~Robert Brault Self: He who takes an accurate account of his moral-stock-in-trade, will find his chief assets to be made up of selfishness, and his principal liability the debt he owes to nature. ~James Lendall Basford Self: How easy it is to be "deep": all you have to do is let yourself sink into your own flaws. ~E.M. Cioran Self: I am a raging sea trapped in a raindrop. ~Author unknown Self: I am my own heaven and hell! ~J.C.F. von Schiller Self: I could not clearly distinguish what was passing in my head; it seemed to me that I was under the influence of a horrible dream and that I had but to awake to find myself cured; at times it seemed that my entire life had been a dream, ridiculous and childish, the falseness of which had just been disclosed. ~Alfred de Musset Self: I know not what phantom we take for self.... ~Alexandre Vinet Self: I like to jot down thoughts and ideas as I tread life's garden, for then sometimes when I am weary I can turn a leaf and find what my mood was on a certain day and that changes a train of thought and brings back sunshine. ~Helen Rose Anne Milman Crofton Self: I like too many things and get all confused and hung up running from one falling star to another till I drop. ~Jack Kerouac Self: I loathe the expression "What makes him tick." It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm. ~James Thurber Self: I must reconsider my position, as I cannot go on living here as I am doing, though I know that there is no such thing as changing one's life: one merely wanders round and round within the circle of one's own personality. ~Oscar Wilde Self: I say , knowing all the while it's not me. ~Samuel Beckett Self: I should like to see any man's biography with corrections and emendations by his ghost. We don't know each other's secrets quite so well as we flatter ourselves we do. We don't always know our own secrets as well as we might. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes Self: I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am. ~Sylvia Plath Self: I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing. ~Katherine Anne Porter Self: I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in the darkness, the astonishing light of your own being. ~Hafez Self: I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again. ~Anaïs Nin Self: If I had it to do again, I would less often judge myself and more often ask for a jury. ~Robert Brault Self: If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain. ~Andre Maurois Self: If solitude deprives of the benefit of advice, it also excludes from the mischief of flattery. But the absence of others' applause is generally supplied by the flattery of one's own breast. ~William Benton Clulow Self: If we cannot be happy and powerful and prey on others, we invent conscience and prey on ourselves. ~Elbert Hubbard Self: If you hate your parents, the man or the establishment, don't show them up by getting wasted and wrapping your car around a tree. If you really want to rebel against your parents, out-learn them, outlive them, and know more than they do. ~Henry Rollins Self: In a speech, the columnist Charles Krauthammer.... offered a new version of Socrates' famous saying, "The unexamined life is not worth living." In our age of bottomless self-love and obsession with our own feelings, Krauthammer suggested, "The too-examined life is not worth living either." ~John Leo, December 1993, Universal Press Syndicate Self: In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be the gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy. ~Robert Louis Stevenson Self: It is hard sometimes to let someone else live by the same deceptions you allow yourself. ~Robert Brault Self: It is no good casting out devils. They belong to us, we must accept them and be at peace with them. ~D.H. Lawrence Self: It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere. ~Agnes Repplier Self: It is not impossibilities which fill us with the deepest despair, but possibilities which we have failed to realize. ~Robert Mallett Self: It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused. ~Marcel Proust Self: It's easy to get lost when the map is in your hand and not in your heart. ~Terri Guillemets Self: It's hard, sometimes, when nothing's stopping you, to know what's stopping you. ~Robert Brault Self: It's like, at the end, there's this surprise quiz: am I proud of me? I gave my life to become the person I am right now! Was it worth what I paid? ~Richard Bach Self: Just let awareness have its way with you completely. ~Scott Morrison Self: Just throw away all thoughts of imaginary things, and stand firm in that which you are. ~Kabir Self: Know well what leads you forward and what holds you back, and choose the path that leads to wisdom. ~Buddha Self: Let thy hands be as the hands of a good watch, through every golden moment marking the worthy progress of the inner life. ~James Lendall Basford Self: Let's get lost in the dark, forget who we were, and resurface as something new. ~Daniel Self: Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us. ~Thomas Browne Self: Looking back, you realize that a very special person passed briefly through your life, and that person was you. It is not too late to become that person again. ~Robert Brault Self: Man casts the shadow of whatever he loves. ~James Lendall Basford Self: Man is never alone. Acknowledged or unacknowledged, that which dreams through him is always there to support him from within. ~Laurence van der Post Self: Many a man gets swamped in the mire of his own character. ~James Lendall Basford Self: Many a one cannot loosen his own fetters, but is nevertheless his friend's emancipator. ~Friedrich Nietzsche Self: Many unwittingly enter into co-partnership with Satan to work out their own destruction. ~James Lendall Basford Self: May those who are impoverished by their thoughts be blessed with the realization of the richness of their spirit. ~Dodinsky Self: Misfortunes one can endure — they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults — ah! there is the sting of life. ~Oscar Wilde Self: Most often, walking alone with my shadow is how I find my answer, the result of gathering together all agreeable parties. ~Robert Brault Self: My flag is raised high today. For others to see, sure. But more so to find which way my wind is blowing. Almost time to chart a course. ~Jeb Dickerson Self: My greatest wealth is the deep stillness in which I strive and grow and win what the world cannot take from me with fire or sword. ~Johan Wolfgang Von Goethe Self: My heart filled with love, flowing over with joy, my own little drum that I like to march by! ~Gunda Fijnje-Nolan, September 4th 2009, winner of The Quote Garden create your own quote contest on Self: My life should be unique; it should be an alms, a battle, a conquest, a medicine. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson Self: No matter how hard you pursue pleasure and success, there are times when you fail. No matter how fast you flee, there are times when pain catches up with you. ~Bhante Henepola Gunaratana Self: No matter what you do in life, a part of you still sits at a curbside, still hearing the drumbeat of a distant parade, still waiting for it to turn the corner. ~Robert Brault Self: No one can drive us crazy unless we give them the keys. ~Doug Horton Self: No sooner is your ocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have been of better vintage. Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men.—Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even, as I said, the . ~Thomas Carlyle Self: Not a blade of grass but has a story to tell, not a heart but has its romance, not a life which does not hide a secret which is either its thorn or its spur. Everywhere grief, hope, comedy, tragedy; even under the petrifaction of old age, as in the twisted forms of fossils, we may discover the agitations and tortures of youth. This thought is the magic wand of poets and of preachers: it strips the scales from our fleshly eyes, and gives us a clear view into human life; it opens to the ear a world of unknown melodies, and makes us understand the thousand languages of nature. Thwarted love makes a man polyglot, and grief transforms him into a diviner and a sorcerer. ~Henri-Frederic Amiel, 28th March 1855 (journal), translated from French by Mary Augusta Ward Self: Once your awareness becomes a flame, it burns up the whole slavery that the mind has created. ~Osho