Be Ourselves Quotes

#1. Antony said to Poemen, 'Our great work is to lay the blame for our sins upon ourselves before God, and to expect to be tempted to our last breath.

Benedicta Ward

#2. The reason why we are disenchanted with ourselves is because we entertain in the depths of our psyche a kind of vision-an anticipated vision of what we could be if we would be what we might be.

Vilayat Inayat Khan

#3. To truly be of service to others, we must first serve the server. The ability to bring an enlightened presence to those in need is the ability to light a candle without burning ourselves out.

Bill Crawford

#4. We would not let ourselves be burned to death for our opinions: we are not sure enough of them for that.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#5. In the area of species protection, we should concern ourselves with what is right as opposed to what might be easier, or popular in the short term.

Richard Leakey

#6. To be made evident, truth must be sought for; for of itself it is slow to appear, and between ourselves and God the obstacles are so many!

George Sand

#7. Perhaps the greatest self-deceit is to tell ourselves that we can be self-sufficient.

Joseph Stowell

#8. Embarrassing ourselves in front of strangers is literally one of the worst things that can happen to us. It's in the slot where polio used to be. Awkwardness, rejection, missing out. We've conquered everything else and these constants of human life are all that remain to bedevil us.

Alexandra Petri

#9. However democratic and egalitarian we kid ourselves into thinking society might be, I think that sense of entitlement operates as basically and viciously as it always did.

Rory Kinnear

#10. We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds, ... for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

T. S. Eliot

#11. We listen to those whom we know to be of the same opinion as ourselves, and we call them wise for being of it; but we avoid such as differ from us.

Walter Savage Landor

#12. Don't be sorry for the truth. A harsh truth is less damaging than a tender lie, and the worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves.

Dianna Hardy

#13. There has to be so many other ways of approaching airline security than demeaning ourselves by giving up a lot of our dignities and our liberty to do this.

Quico Canseco

#14. We will only begin to forgive when we can look upon the wrongdoers as ourselves, neither better nor worse. We need to remember that we coexist as mortals in the world, together, the wronged and the wrongdoer, and that, in our common humanity, the situation could readily be reversed.

Leo Buscaglia

#15. How learned and fine we believed ourselves to be! How shitty of the world to deal with us this way.

Robert Stone

#16. Yeah, I think we have to. If we want our shows to be - if we want the quality of the shows to be good, and we want the energy to be high, and if we want to be in good enough physical shape to do them, and not exhaust ourselves on the road, and not get stale, we have to pace.

Jerry Garcia

#17. We can never be a nation of snobs so long as we are willing to poke fun at ourselves.

Edgar Wilson Nye

#18. Is self-interest a bad thing? We want our leaders to be pure and good, but at the same time we want them to be effective, and to be effective you often have to be ruthless and not bound by ideology or the same morals that we pretend to hold ourselves to.

Beau Willimon

#19. Our minds are small because they are faithless,' I said to myself.
'If we had faith in God our hearts would share in His greatness and
peace for we should not then be shut up in ourselves, but would walk
abroad in him

George MacDonald

#20. And here we must narrowly watch ourselves, seeing that banquets can scarcely be celebrated blamelessly, for almost always luxury accompanies feasting; and when the body is swallowed up in the delight of refreshing itself, the heart relaxes to empty joys.

Pope Gregory I

#21. We deceive ourselves when giving respect to the person for whom we have surrendered ourselves, when we respectively expect them to be as we would wish them to be.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#22. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.

Hermann Hesse

#23. We have an obligation to ourselves to foster the environment that allows for our self-actualization. Rather than my gifts serving me, I must serve them. I want to be a steward of the best aspects of my character and assist them in their fulfillment through proper discipline and habits.

Chris Matakas

#24. Often we tell ourselves, "Don't just sit there, do something!" But when we practice awareness, we discover that the opposite may be more helpful: "Don't just do something, sit there!"

Nhat Hanh

#25. Let us never consider ourselves finished nurses ... we must be learning all of our lives.

Florence Nightingale

#26. There is the fear that we shan't prove worthy in the eyes of someone who knows us at least as well as we know ourselves. That is the fear of God. And there is the fear of Man -fear that men won't understand us and we shall be cut of from them.

Robert Frost

#27. We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.

Steven Pinker

#28. Why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?

Sylvia Plath

#29. How frustrating to think you can be lost to yourself. And yet how often it is that a stranger stares back at you from the mirror. Maybe in truth we never see ourselves as clearly as the thousands of eyes that daily take us in.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#30. I think the key to happiness is allowing ourselves to not feel bad or guilty for feeling it, and letting it be contagious. And to not be dependent on other people to create your own happiness.

Brittany Murphy

#31. Freedom can reside only in a point of view, a way of looking upon the system of necessity.Surely this is the one freedom that we may attain to: not to be released from physical reality, but to understand reality and ourselves as part of it, and so be reconciled to what we are.

Roger Scruton

#32. If we are to be aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish our hard-earned control of ourselves.

Madeleine L'Engle

#33. I do believe 50 is the new 40 and 60 is the new 50. Hell, maybe 60 can be the new 40, I don't know. I believe that when we give ourselves permission, we can live with an excitement and heat and passion that most women in previous generations were unable to attain.

Marianne Williamson

#34. As we trust the Lord, we start "emptying" ourselves with things that tie us or entangle us in order to be filled by God's grace and the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way.

Yilda B. Rivera

#35. We all deserve to be treated with nothing but respect. In order to command respect from others, we must first and foremost respect ourselves.

Julie-Anne

#36. If we are to be destroyed we will do it ourselves by warfare with thermonuclear weaponry.

Lewis Thomas

#37. It depends on ourselves to be to each others, either a blessing or a torment.

African Spir

#38. There is a price to be paid for fabricating around us a society which is as artifical and as mechanized as our own, and this is that we can exist in it only on condition that we adapt ourselves to it. This is our punishment.

Philip Sherrard

#39. There are very good evolutionary reasons for having religion. From early human history we have evolved a need to see God. We have a perception of ourselves and in order for that to be a true perception we have to believe in a soul within us.

Jonathan Trigell

#40. A barracks is meant to be a place where real soldiers were to be fed and equipped for war, not a place to settle down in or as a comfortable snuggery in which to enjoy ourselves. I hope that if ever they, our soldiers, do settle down God will burn their barracks over their heads!

Catherine Booth

#41. When we stand, we do so not only for ourselves, but also for countless others who have similar stories but may never have an opportunity to be witnessed.

William Keepin

#42. We must neither behave as children by resisting honesty, nor allow ourselves to be treated as children by having honesty withheld.

John McWhorter

#43. If we cannot be happy and powerful and prey on others, we invent conscience and prey on ourselves.

Elbert Hubbard

#44. Love is something that we don't control. We have to be ourselves. You can be sexual, nonsexual, asexual, bisexual, or trisexual and it really doesn't have a lot to do with enlightenment.

Frederick Lenz

#45. We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or other people's models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.

Shakti Gawain

#46. We ourselves can never be free if we rob others of their freedom.

Sharon Gannon

#47. We often tell ourselves off for wasting time in chairs, fully dressed, when we could be doing the same lying down in bed, face to face and naked.

Ian McEwan

#48. We shall not be properly educated ourselves, nor will the guardians whom we are training, until we can recognise the qualities of discipline, courage, generosity, greatness of mind, and others akin to them, as well as their opposites in all their manifestations.

Plato

#49. There is that gnawing feeling that we are far more than what we believe ourselves to be. Maybe it's time to believe the gnawing.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#50. We have to learn to be kind to ourselves. In the long run avoiding unpleasantness is a very unkind thing to do to yourself.

Henepola Gunaratana

#51. Make ourselves attractive to students?" said the Archchancellor. "Mr Stibbons, the whole idea of a university is that it should be hard to get into.

Terry Pratchett

#52. By our ideas on how others 'ought to be' we rob ourselves of the chance to know them for who they already are. - See beyond the limits of your expectations.

Russell Kyle

#53. I think when it comes to women who write or who fancy ourselves 'hip downtown literati', there is a certain contempt for being overly sexual or really looking for boyfriends. We tend to be marginalized as some 'Sex & The City' Carrie Bradshaw chick-lit dummies who just want shoes and a ring.

Julie Klausner

#54. When confronted with a clear definition of what it is to be Mexican, we encounter ourselves in a never ending allegory of mixes and chaos.

Gael Garcia Bernal

#55. I'm one of them. The weirdos and the freaks. My point was that it's ok to be different, and from now on we'd better be, if we're going to make something of ourselves. It's the one thing I learned in school. Different is ok. -Victoria

Danielle Steel

#56. What is it in us that makes us feel the need to keep pretending ... we gotta let ourselves be.

Christina Aguilera

#57. One of the advantages or disadvantages of the way in which we live in these modern days is that we are ceasing to feel. That is to say we do not permit ourselves to be affected by either death or misfortune, provided these natural calamities leave our own persons unscathed.

Marie Corelli

#58. Even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.

Donna Tartt

#59. When we are devoted to the development of kindness, it becomes our ready response, so that reacting from compassion, from caring, is not a question of giving ourselves a lecture: 'I don't really feel like it, but I'd better be helpful, or what would people think?'

Sharon Salzberg

#60. If we allow ourselves even for a moment to contemplate the vast weight of suffering in the world, we will easily be overwhelmed with grief. This is why we develop the habit and self-protective instinct of overlooking the suffering around us.

Thabiti M. Anyabwile

#61. It is a dangerous thing to be satisfied with ourselves.

Teresa Of Avila

#62. The government has no business knowing how much money we make and how we made it. It's none of their business. And that's why I believe that manufacturing is critical. If we can't feed ourselves, fuel ourselves and fight for ourselves, we can't be free.

Mike Huckabee

#63. I tell them that if compulsive eating is anything, it's a way we leave ourselves when life gets hard. When we don't want to notice what is going on. Compulsive eating is a way we distance ourselves from the way things are when they are not how we want them to be.

Geneen Roth

#64. We should never be at the mercy of Providence if only we understood that we ourselves are Providence.

Vera Brittain

#65. The unselfish effort to bring cheer to others will be the beginning of a happier life for ourselves.

Helen Keller

#66. We have to be careful that in throwing out the devil, we don't throw out the best part of ourselves.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#67. What we miss is how unsustainable that is. Even bigger is the idea that we as a nation are not made up of businesses, banks, malls, markets, homes or things. Our greatest asset is ourselves: our lives and our people. The real investment should be there.

Brian Ulrich

#68. Surrendering to life offers some wonderful realizations. We learn we're capable of being in this dance, of working with whatever happens. We learn to trust ourselves and then others and, gradually, we learn that life itself can be trusted.

Margaret J. Wheatley

#69. Be generous to the poor orphans and those in need. The man to whom our Lord has been liberal ought not to be stingy. We shall one day find in Heaven as much rest and joy as we ourselves have dispensed in this life.

Saint Ignatius

#70. We are not immortal ourselves, my friend; how can we expect our enjoyments to be so? We have no rose without its thorn; no pleasure without alloy. It is the law of our existence; and we must acquiesce.

Thomas Jefferson

#71. When we love all parts of ourselves, when we bless all of ourselves, when we honor all of our history and all of our insecurities, doubts, worries, and fears, we become the women that we always wanted to be.

Debbie Ford

#72. We learn to make a shell for ourselves when we are young and then spend the rest of our lives hoping for someone to reach inside and touch us. Just touch us - anything more than that would be too much for us to bear.

Bill Russell

#73. There are too many things we do not wish to know about ourselves. People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal (equal, after all, to what and to whom?) but they love the idea of being superior.

James Baldwin

#74. For there were good men. As long as we women remembered to be strong. As long as we remembered to be ourselves

Mindy Klasky

#75. Sometimes, we find ourselves as conservatives being angry when we should be joyful, finding ourselves being negative when we should be positive, because we have a positive message to send ... We ought to be the most compassionate people in the world.

Kevin Cramer

#76. This is life in a fallen world, where wars come and go, where nations rage and people cry in torment. We must be strong, not in ourselves, but in Him. And trust that His love and His wisdom and His light will see us through.

Janette Oke

#77. By doing well the duty which is nearest to us, the duty which is in our hands now, we make ourselves stronger; and improving our strength in this manner step by step, we may reach a state in which it shall be our privilege to do the most coveted and honored duties in life and in society.

Swami Vivekananda

#78. Paradoxically, we fail to disclose ourselves to other people because we want so much to be loved. Because we feel that way, we present ourselves as someone we think can be loved and accepted, and we conceal whatever would mar that image.

Sidney Jourard

#79. It is of great importance, when we begin to practise prayer, not to let ourselves be frightened by our own thoughts.

Teresa Of Avila

#80. I think that is a better thing than thanksgiving: thanks-living. How is this to be done? By a general cheerfulness of manner, by an obedience to the command of Him by whose mercy we live, by a perpetual, constant delighting of ourselves in the Lord, and by a submission of our desires to His will.

Charles Spurgeon

#81. He remembered his old tutor at theological college telling him, 'There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved. We need to remember this about ourselves when we think of others.' On

James Runcie

#82. ...I had always believed prayer ought to be conducted on our feet rather than on our knees, since God seems in all other departments of life to require us to stand upright and account for ourselves.

Charles Frazier

#83. Steady and righteous we may be, my friend, but without courage to risk ourselves for our brother, we are but politicians - blustering whores to rhetoric.

Christopher Moore

#84. The Prince to a slightly more upbeat view of human action. In order "not to rule out our free will," he arrives at a formula by which Fortune is "the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half or so to be controlled by ourselves.

Ross King

#85. In order to always treat others, as we would wish to be treated ourselves, we have to learn about each other. Not just relying on an op-ed piece we may have read here, or a half-remembered interview on the television program there that happens to chime with our own views.

Karen Armstrong

#86. We remove ourselves from the experience itself to a surrogate of the experience, which is whatever measure you take from the brain, be it the electroencephalogram or magnet encephalography or say functional magnetic resonance. So it's pretty tough to make those comparisons.

Antonio Damasio

#87. It is, I think, a far lesser offense to blatantly ignore God's directions for our lives rather than arrogantly think ourselves shrewd enough to be able to bend them to our liking without breaking them and therefore breaking ourselves.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#88. How could we even begin to disarm greed and envy? Perhaps by being much less greedy and envious ourselves; perhaps by resisting the temptation of letting our luxuries become needs; and perhaps by even scrutinising our needs to see if they cannot be simplified and reduced.

Ernst F. Schumacher

#89. Part of being of a true existentialist is wanting to be what we make ourselves be by the way we choose to act, as opposed to making excuses for the way we act and regretting it.

Gary Cox

#90. Prudence is a duty which we owe ourselves, and if we will be so much our own enemies as to neglect it, we are not to wonder if the world is deficient in discharging their duty to us; for when a man lays the foundation of his own ruin, others too often are apt to build upon it.

Henry Fielding

#91. Sometimes we exclude things in ourselves in order to be like everybody else around us-our ethnicity, our social backgrounds, our ideas. What kind of world is it that will not allow me to be myself, and is it really good for me to be there? What part of me will die a slow death if I stay?

Joan D. Chittister

#92. Alexander operated by the same principle. Let us conduct ourselves so that all men wish to be our friends and all fear to be our enemies.

Steven Pressfield

#93. A boat would seem to be an object whose one purpose is to travel, but its real purpose is not to travel but to reach harbour. We found ourselves on the high seas, with no idea of which port we should be aiming for.

Fernando Pessoa

#94. I am less blindly confident than I once was, for I have been learning a truer estimate of myself, my failings and limitations, in these dark days. I have learnt to hope that if there be a Judgment Day of some kind, God will not see us with our own eyes, nor judge us as we judge ourselves.

Vera Brittain

#95. How can we not still be rooting for the younger versions of ourselves as if they actually exist, playing catch-up in time? Who wouldn't like to implant their current brains into a scenario from the past?

Sloane Crosley

#96. One of the greatest gifts of Black feminism to ourselves has been to make it a little easier simply to be Black and female.

Barbara Smith

#97. In football we always said that the other team couldn't beat us. We had to be sure that we didn't beat ourselves. And that's what people have to do, too-make sure they don't beat themselves.

Woody Hayes

#98. Our attitude towards ourselves should be 'to be satiable in learning' and towards others 'to be tireless in teaching.

Mao Zedong

#99. Our heart is a garden, which the good God has given us to cultivate, and we must always be aware of the weeds that grow without observation. It is necessary that we should unceasingly apply ourselves to the cultivation of the good and the extraction of the evil which might take root.

Christoph Von Schmid

#100. At that point, one of two things usually happens. Either we blame the client or we blame ourselves. The first gives rise to a terrible therapist; the second, a soon-to-be burned out, a.k.a. former, therapist.

Linda Curran