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
Self: One cannot spend forever sitting and solving the mysteries of one's history. ~Lemony Snicket
Self: One must have chaos within one to give birth to a dancing star. ~Friedrich Nietzsche
Self: One's only real life is the life one never leads. ~Oscar Wilde
Self: Only you can set you free. ~Living Colour
Self: Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny. ~Eric Hoffer
Self: People aren't ignoring you. They are busy with their lives. And the way to stop feeling ignored is to get busy with yours. ~Robert Brault
Self: People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self: Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again. ~Chinese inscription cited by Thoreau in
Self: Reputation is in itself only a farthing candle, of a wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit. ~James Russell Lowell
Self: Self is the only prison that can ever bind the soul. ~Henry Van Dyke
Self: Self-delusion: short term self-protection in exchange for longer term self-destruction. ~Dr. Idel Dreimer
Self: Self-destruction is the effect of cowardice in the highest extreme. ~Daniel Defoe
Self: Selfishness is a bottomless pit. ~James Lendall Basford
Self: So you are lean and mean and resourceful and you continue to walk on the edge of the precipice because over the years you have become fascinated by how close you can walk without losing your balance. ~Attributed to Richard M. Nixon
Self: Some things become so completely our own that we forget them. ~Antonio Porchia
Self: Sometimes at night I light a lamp so as not to see. ~Antonio Porchia
Self: Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living. ~Jonathan Safran Foer
Self: Sometimes I feel like I'm going nowhere, in opposite directions. ~Terri Guillemets
Self: Sometimes I feel like life misprinted me. ~Terri Guillemets
Self: Sometimes I'm doing things considered crazy by others, but then my heart giggles. That's when I know I am doing the right thing. ~Dodinsky
Self: Sometimes it's worth getting lost to see who will come looking for us. ~Robert Brault
Self: Sometimes we give up a dream to play a larger role in someone else's dream. ~Robert Brault
Self: Sometimes you can get so far in yourself that you don't know who you are. ~Henry Rollins
Self: Sometimes you have to breakdown before you can breakthrough. ~Marilyn Ferguson
Self: Sometimes, when I get too wrapped up in myself, I like to take a walk into town, and for an afternoon or so, just be the passing stranger in other people's lives. ~Robert Brault
Self: Take the time to come home to yourself every day. ~Robin Casarjean
Self: Take your work seriously, but never yourself. ~Margot Fonteyn
Self: Tell me what you feel in your room when the full moon is shining in upon you and your lamp is dying out, and I will tell you how old you are, and I shall know if you are happy. ~Henri Frederic Amiel
Self: That's the thing about needs. Sometimes when you get them met, you don't need them anymore. ~Michael Patrick King
Self: The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us. ~Robert Louis Stevenson
Self: The Divine does not like to be shut up in a building. The Divine likes to be out in the open. It is right here in this very body. Each one of us is a miniature universe, a living shrine. ~Morihei Ueshiba
Self: The finest thing in the world is knowing how to belong to oneself. ~Michel de Montaigne
Self: The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss — an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. — is sure to be noticed.
Self: The hardest prisons to break out of are the ones we build ourselves. ~Author unknown
Self: The inward light is forever striving to gather enough additional light to penetrate the fog of our senses. ~Henry Stanley Haskins
Self: The man that shows off, to that one who wants to convince of his value is to himself. ~Domenico Cieri Estrada
Self: The mirror will only lie, when you look at it through a mask. ~Anthony Liccione
Self: The only man we have any respect for is the man who uses all the endowment he has, and uses it until he bleeds. ~Martin H. Fischer
Self: The only person you should ever compete with is yourself. You can't hope for a fairer match. ~Todd Ruthman
Self: The outward man is the swinging door; the inner man is the still hinge. ~Eckhart
Self: The peace you seek is there, it's there between all the traffic in your mind, stop and rest for peace will find you if you let it. ~Mike Dolan
Self: The promises of this world are, for the most part, vain phantoms; and to confide in one's self, and become something of worth and value is the best and safest course. ~Michelangelo
Self: The ratio of matter, mind and spirit continually changes. ~James Lendall Basford
Self: The simplest and most familiar truth seems new and wonderful the instant we ourselves experience it for the first time. ~Marie Dubsky, Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach
Self: The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely. ~Lorraine Hansberry
Self: The treasure of self is buried under the rainbow and yet glows beyond the sun. ~Terri Guillemets
Self: The trick to liking who you are is not to hate too much the person it turned out you weren't. ~Robert Brault
Self: The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual — namely to You. ~Walt Whitman
Self: The words "I am" are potent words; be careful what you hitch them to. The thing you're claiming has a way of reaching back and claiming you. ~A.L. Kitselman
Self: The world is not outside you. ~Ramana Maharshi
Self: There are at least two kinds of cowards. One kind always lives with himself, afraid to face the world. The other kind lives with the world, afraid to face himself. ~Roscoe Snowden
Self: There are plenty of people holding flashlights casting shadows, offering directions. Perhaps it's best if you light your own way. ~Jeb Dickerson
Self: There comes a morning in life when you wake up a new person; that is to say, you wake up the same person but you realize it's your own fault. ~Robert Brault
Self: There is a public me and a private me, who, if they were separate people, probably wouldn't exchange Christmas cards. ~Robert Brault
Self: There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself. ~W. Somerset Maugham
Self: There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others. ~Michel de Montaigne
Self: There is great security in the prisons we create for ourselves. ~Stephen G. Scalese
Self: There is luxury in self-reproach.... When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us. ~Oscar Wilde
Self: There is no reason why a man should show his life to the world. The world does not understand things.... I have said to you that to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies in much worse.... what is said of man is nothing. The point is, who says it. A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life. ~Oscar Wilde, letter to Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie")
Self: There is nothing noble about being superior to some other person. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self. ~Hindustani Proverb
Self: There is part of us that stands in quiet witness to what we do, taking notes, waiting for a solitary moment to bring up the subject. ~Robert Brault
Self: There's nothing like self-improvement to get your friends to like you for who you were. ~Robert Brault
Self: Things happen in life that make us question our faith when perhaps they ought to make us question our life. ~Robert Brault
Self: Though confined to our destiny, we do get to pick the color scheme. ~Robert Brault
Self: To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright. ~Walter Benjamin
Self: To wash one's hair, make one's toilet, and put on scented robes; even if not a soul sees one, these preparations still produce an inner pleasure. ~Sei Shonagon
Self: Unjust. How many times I've used that word, scolded myself with it. All I mean by it now is that I don't have the final courage to say that I refuse to preside over violations against myself, and to hell with justice. ~Lillian Hellman
Self: Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him. Then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say, "This I am today; that I will be tomorrow." ~Louis L'Amour
Self: We all have to escape from this thing called life sometimes. Maybe we use substances to do it. Maybe we use religion. Maybe we use exercise. Maybe we use anger. But we all have to do it. blog, www.danoah.com
Self: We all know the part of us that needs to be harnessed. It takes someone else to know the part of us that needs to be set free. ~Robert Brault
Self: We are all primary numbers divisible only by ourselves. ~Jean Guitton
Self: We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us. ~W.B. Yeats
Self: We are known to our friends by a look in our eyes that we never see in a mirror. ~Robert Brault
Self: We are lost if we get too much time to think about ourselves, provided that we regard ourselves not as an object of study, as a specimen, but always as everything that we now are. We become conscious of so much that is sad that at the thought of it we lose all inclination to bring the elements into order and connection. ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Self: We are sure to be losers when we quarrel with ourselves; it is civil war. ~Charles Caleb Colton
Self: We confess to little faults only to persuade ourselves that we have no great ones. ~François VI de la Rochefoucault
Self: We do not deal much in facts when we are contemplating ourselves. ~Mark Twain
Self: We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be. ~Jane Austen
Self: We must be our own before we can be another's. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self: We sometimes feel that we have been really understood, but it was always long ago, by someone now dead. ~Mignon McLaughlin
Self: We're all on different paths, but action is hard work and you must drive your own soul. ~Terri Guillemets
Self: Were it in his power to choose another life and another soul, I am not sure, if he could have his own over again, whether he would take anybody else's. ~Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Self: What an odd, ruminating, noisy, self-interrupting conversation we conduct with ourselves from birth to death. ~Diane Ackerman
Self: What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne
Self: What we do flows from who we are. ~Paul Vitale
Self: When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep. Nay, and when I walk alone in a beautiful Orchard, if my Thoughts are some part of the Time taken up with strange Occurrences, I some part of the Time call them back again to my Walk, or to the Orchard, to the Sweetness of the Solitude, and to my self. ~Michel de Montaigne
Self: When I look for my existence I do not look for it in myself. ~Antonio Porchia
Self: When the fight begins within himself, a man's worth something. ~Robert Browning
Self: When they were in school, Peter used to say that everything you do is a self-portrait.... "The only thing an artist can do is describe his own face." You're doomed to being you. This, he says, leaves us free to draw anything, since we're only drawing ourselves. Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It's all giving you away.... Everything is a self-portrait. ~Chuck Palahniuk
Self: When you blame and criticize others, you are avoiding some truth about yourself. ~Deepak Chopra
Self: With regard to our bad qualities there can be only perpetual warfare or disgraceful peace. ~Marie Dubsky, Freifrau von Ebner-Eschenbach
Self: You grow up the day you have your first real laugh, at yourself. ~Ethel Barrymore
Self: You have the Answer. Just get quiet enough to hear it. ~Pat Obuchowski
Self: Your burden is of false self-identifications—abandon them all. ~Nisargadatta Maharaj
Self: Your heart knows your song, but you have to be willing to listen to the words.
Self: Your soul is all that you possess. Take it in hand and make something of it! ~Martin H. Fischer
Self: Your spirit is the true shield. ~Morihei Ueshiba