Top 100 Being Oneself Quotes
#1. A child should be allowed to take as long as she needs for knowing everything about herself, which is the same as learning to be herself. Even twenty-five years if necessary, or even forever. And it wouldn't matter if doing things got delayed, because nothing is really important but being oneself.
Laura Riding
#2. Telling a true story about personal experience is not just a matter of being oneself, or even or finding oneself. It is also a matter of choosing oneself.
Harriet Lerner
#4. There is nothing one fears more or is more ashamed of than not being oneself. Yet few people realize even an approximation of their true potential. Most people must live with varying degrees of the shame and fear of not being fully in control of themselves.
William S. Burroughs
#5. For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.
Virginia Woolf
#6. The price of being oneself is so high and involves so much ruthlessness toward others (or what looks like ruthlessness in our duty-bound culture) that very few people can afford it.
May Sarton
#7. Being oneself is completely beyond all motivation. You cannot be yourself for some reason. You are yourself, and no reason is needed.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
#8. Is it possible to cause so much misery to another human being, simply by being oneself? she wondered, feeling a reflection of that misery. No help for it; she must continue to be herself.
Amy Witting
#9. Christian heroism, and indeed one perhaps sees little enough of that, is to risk unreservedly being oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual human being alone before God, alone in this enormous exertion and this enormous accountability
Soren Kierkegaard
#10. The state we call realization is simply being oneself, not knowing anything or becoming anything.
Ramana Maharshi
#11. Courage lies in being oneself, in showing complete independence, in loving what one loves, in discovering the deep roots of one's feelings.
Fernand Pouillon
#12. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.
Virginia Woolf
#13. I find that being oneself is an excellent choice, as everyone else is already taken.
April White
#14. It's quite uncanny what one sets in motion by being oneself.
William Kennedy
#15. Be the person you are. Never try to be another, and you will become mature. Maturity is accepting the responsibility of being oneself, whatsoever the cost.
Rajneesh
#16. An artist is only an artist on condition that he neglects no aspect of his dual nature. This dualism is the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time.
Charles Baudelaire
#17. The foundation stone of all philosophy is self-knowledge and being true to thy self. A person must address an inner necessity in order to realize the fundamental truth about oneself, seek self-improvement, and gain knowledge through experience.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#18. One should not google oneself. My mother lets me know when I'm being followed by paparazzi.
Ginnifer Goodwin
#19. Living for oneself is a bad thing. The keenest intellectual pleasure comes from being able to return to the self after being absent from it for a spell. But living all the time inside the self, that most tyrannical, demanding and capricious of companions - no, one shouldn't do it.
George Sand
#20. Real success in the kingdom of God is not about being strong and looking good and knowing all the right answers. It's about continually yielding oneself to Jesus and determining to take purposeful little steps of obedience, and the ragged reality that it's all about God and His grace at work in us.
Mary Beth Chapman
#21. The right to evaluate risk for oneself is part of what it means to be a functioning human being.
Mark Steyn
#22. Neurosis is an inner cleavage-the state of being at war with oneself.
Carl Jung
#23. It is a mistake to restrict oneself in one's pleasures,' Ross said. 'One should never risk being thought a Puritan.
Winston Graham
#24. Judging oneself to be inferior to other people was one of the worst acts of pride because it was the most destructive way of being different.
Paulo Coelho
#25. That was the mark of genuine beauty. Not being beautiful oneself, but making everything around them beautiful.
Sean DeLauder
#26. Heterosexuals failed to grasp that if you lost yourself in the tease - in the pleasure and power of turning someone on - that that could be as arousing as being teased and turned on oneself.
Mary Roach
#27. After they see me, when their mothers are feeding them all that cashmere sweater and girdle
[expletive deleted by the New York Times], maybe they'll have a second thought - that they can be themselves and win.
Janis Joplin
#28. It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right
especially when one is right.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#29. I may attempt a novel. I think that no matter what you write, it requires being honest with oneself, and you have to pull yourself out of the whirlwind of daily life.
Iris Chang
#30. It is awkward to listen to oneself being praised, and I was always a shy man.
H. Rider Haggard
#31. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.
C. G. Jung
#32. Feeling free inside oneself is being free.
Rei Kawakubo
#33. If there is a Way involving the spirit of not being defeated, to help oneself and gain honour, it is the Way of Strategy.
Miyamoto Musashi
#34. Being able to support oneself allows one to choose a marriage out of love and not just economic dependence. It also allows one to risk that marriage.
Gloria Steinem
#35. Nate hated, really hated, being told he thought too much. Jason wasn't the only one who said it: hippie-dippie types who romanticize the natural and the "intuitive" also prefer feeling to thought. But not thinking was a way of giving oneself license to be a dick.
Adelle Waldman
#36. Nothing is forgotten in the processes of idealization. Reveries of idealization develop, not by letting oneself be taken in by memories, but by constantly dreaming the values of a being whom one would love. And that is the way a great dreamer dreams his double. His magnified double sustains him.
Gaston Bachelard
#38. The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.
Milan Kundera
#39. It is true that nothing is gained without something being lost: everyone knows that in fulfilling oneself one necessarily sacrifices some possibilities.
Simone De Beauvoir
#40. Josh Billings said, It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient one, too. Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves, and the modern world is particularly rich in such stratagems.
John W. Gardner
#41. I always disagree, however, when people end up saying that we can only combat Communism, Fascism or what not if we develop an equal fanaticism. It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.
George Orwell
#42. The odor of literature as a stopgap, of words piled one upon the other to avoid taking action or to console oneself for being incapable of it.
Rene Daumal
#43. One curiosity of being a foreigner everywhere is that one finds oneself discerning Edens where the locals see only Purgatory.
Pico Iyer
#44. Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.
Franz Kafka
#45. I could not get used to the idea of ther being classes of people inherently inferior to oneself, to whom one could be as odiously condescendign or downright brutal as one likes, yet with whom one lived as intimately as family.
Robyn Davidson
#46. And yet I know that expressing oneself necessarily means being different. The writer's voice is a singular one, solitary. Art is nothing other than the freedom to express oneself in any language, in whatever manner, dressed any which way.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#47. He can switch from one view to another with frightening ease. I think it is a sign of being accustomed to such power that the truth does not matter because you cannot be contradicted.
Anna Funder
#48. She felt that she had revealed something to Cat, and with revealing something about oneself there always comes a sense of lightening of the load that we all carry; the load of being ourselves.
Alexander McCall Smith
#49. Children were quite disturbing really. It was difficult to think about children for long. They were all fickle little nihilists and one was forever being forced to protect oneself from their murderousness.
Joy Williams
#50. Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
Sigmund Freud
#51. To exist without purpose is to be at the mercy of the chance encounter, the chance invitation, the chance phone call, the chance event- always being controlled by forces external to oneself.
Nathaniel Branden
#52. Humility is the proper attitude towards all true greatness, including one's own greatness as a human being, but above all towards the greatness which is not oneself, which is beyond one's self
Karol Wojtyla
#53. If you shift your focus from oneself to others, and think more about others' well-being and welfare, it has an immediate liberating effect.
Dalai Lama
#54. Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they've become.
James Baldwin
#55. Those who truly love and respect you will respect your boundaries. I think freeing oneself from codependency and fear is vital for well-being.
Maria Canals Barrera
#56. Why not be oneself? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound why try to look like a Pekinese?
Edith Sitwell
#57. The recognition of oneself as a part of nature, and reliance on natural things, are disappearing for hundreds of millions of people who do not know that anything is being lost.
Robertson Davies
#58. In the past few years, I have made a thrilling discovery ... that until one is over sixty, one can never really learn the secret of living. One can then begin to live, not simply with the intense part of oneself, but with one's entire being.
Ellen Glasgow
#59. It was like being in love with the sun: brilliant and intoxicating to be near, but impossible to keep to oneself.
Alma Katsu
#60. What she was doing, what she had just done, was for her not about frivolity, it was about the essential, about being human, living as a human being, reminding oneself of what one was, and so it mattered, and if necessary was worth a fight.
Mohsin Hamid
#61. In the old days people never bothered about what others did, so long as they were free to do what they liked themselves. Today, one cannot sneeze without being corrected, let alone enjoy oneself. That's what politics have done to our society
Tunku Abdul Rahman
#62. To be oneself is being neither under bond nor borrowed nor sold nor hired. To be, means to be spiritually free.
Theo Van Doesburg
#63. I have that precious commodity - freedom. I can live my life a day at a time, and I am open to whatever the next day brings. I know I sound as if I have been off with some guru in India, but I haven't. I've come to realise the value of being able to decide for oneself.
Cherie Lunghi
#64. Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined to specific career paths.
Jonathan Stroud
#65. Yes! live life with every fibre of one's being, surrender oneself to it, with no thoughts of rebellion, without deluding oneself that one can improve it and render it painless.
Emile Zola
#66. One can rarely say enough about the kindness of Italians. One is always treated as a human being who needs unpredictable things - like a moment by oneself with a bottle on the beach. They have a true gift for what can only be called spontaneous delicacy.
Lawrence Osborne
#67. The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.
C.S. Lewis
#68. Mindful awareness / Mindful (Res):Awareness of present-moment experience, with intention and purpose, without grasping on to judgments. Traits of being mindful are having an open stance toward oneself and others, emotional equanimity, and the ability to describe the inner world of the mind.
Daniel J. Siegel
#69. Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.
Gerald Brenan
#70. The best method of protecting oneself against the inflow of negative thoughts being released by other people is that of keeping the broadcasting station so busy sending out positive thoughts that no time will be available for receiving negative thoughts. This formula is unbeatable.
Napoleon Hill
#71. You can't help people being right for the wrong reasons ... This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity; it is an expression of a lack of self-confidence.
Arthur Koestler
#72. One who has self-esteem esteems oneself because one knows the value of one's being as a singular yet universal expression of the highest value in the Kosmos-the Universal Self, also known as God, Kami, or Brahma, or by many other names.
Yasuhiko Kimura
#73. Simply said, one is contingent through and through, partaking of being rather than generating it out of some source within oneself; and the same is true of the whole intricate web of interdependencies that constitutes nature.
David Bentley Hart
#74. Neither parenting, Christian education, heritage, nor fine church involvement can alter anyone's essential sin nature. To lie, make self-centered choices, be destructive, or be deeply hurtful to oneself or others may be "out of character," but it is not outside of any human being's nature.
Rick Horne
#75. Depression could be considered the exact opposite of the strange obsession with being entirely oneself - of identifying no more - that tool hold of our societies of the early 1960s.
Alain Ehrenberg
#76. One may have a right to be unconventional and even eccentric, so long as one is fully competent and a decent person; but one's ideal as a professor should be to conduct oneself as an admirable human being: just, kind, tolerant, competent, committed, and good-humored.
Robert Audi
#77. That is the whole trouble with being a heretic. One usually must think out everything for oneself.
Aubrey Menen
#78. So to conduct one's life as to realize oneself-this seems to me the highest attainment possible to a human being. It is the task of one and all of us, but most of us bungle it.
Henrik Ibsen
#79. To be honest to oneself, and that is very hard to do.
Bruce Lee
#80. There is less harm to be suffered in being mad among madmen than in being sane all by oneself.
Denis Diderot
#81. Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or, more accurately, liberating oneself, or, more accurately, being indestructible, or, more accurately, being.
Franz Kafka
#82. For the Afro-American in the 1920's being a 'New Negro' was being 'Modern'. And being an 'New Negro' meant, largely, not being an 'Old Negro', disassociating oneself from the symbols and legacy of slavery - being urbane, assertive militant.
Nathan Huggins
#84. Every time I add something I truly believe is original and belonging to myself it ends up being stolen orn taken down.
So No! I will not add any quotes Besides it's considered a Narcissistic act to quote oneself in my book.
Zachary Appleton
#85. Physical jealousy is a result of the imagination at the same time as being a self-judgment. One attributes to the rival the nasty thoughts one had oneself in the same circumstances.
Albert Camus
#86. To be completely honest with oneself is the very best effort a human being can make.
Sigmund Freud
#87. I was wrong, after all, to tell you that the essential was to avoid judgement. The essential is being able to permit oneself everything, even if, from time to time, one has to profess vociferously one's own infamy.
Albert Camus
#88. Strange as it may seem - or perhaps it does not seem so strange - they all had the same thought: it was so much easier to kill humans on the battlefield than animals in cages, even if, on the battlefield, one might end up being killed oneself.
Haruki Murakami
#89. Successful living does not mean accumulating material things, it means inner peace of mind; it means that gift of being able to adjust oneself to everyone else; it also means that all your needs for daily living will be taken care of by God.
Albert E Cliffe
#90. The sense of doing good , the satisfaction of being right, the joy of looking favorably upon oneself, dear sir, are powerful levers for keeping us upright and making us progress. On the other hand, if men are deprived of that feeling, they are changed into rabid dogs.
Albert Camus
#91. Truly being authentic is knowing what matters to you, on the deepest level of who you are, and committing always to act from that authentic center.
Richie Norton
#92. True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.
R.D. Laing
#93. As my prayer became more attentive and inward, I had less and less to say. I finally became completely silent ... This is how it is. To pray does not mean to listen to oneself speaking. Prayer involves becoming silent, and being silent, and waiting until God is heard.
Soren Kierkegaard
#94. The point is that only one thing matters in this world, to prepare oneself for death. One can try to be as comfortable as possible until one dies ... Because being comfortable does not have any meaning either. It just does not. Everything is only a big meaninglessness that one must bear.
Odd Nerdrum
#95. How one can live without being able to judge oneself, criticize what one has accomplished, and still enjoy what one does, is unimaginable to me.
Anna Freud
#96. Love can be simply stated to be the desire of the human being to integrate oneself with other selves in such a way that one starts feeling the pain and pleasure of another person as if of one's own.
Awdhesh Singh
#97. Showing oneself eager for office was a sign of being unworthy of it, for the office-seeker probably had selfish views rather than the public good in mind.
Gordon S. Wood
#98. Being moderate with oneself and generous with others; this is what is meant by having a just relationship with money, by being free as far as money is concerned.
Natalia Ginzburg
#99. Maybe being married is talking to oneself with one's other self listening.
Ruth Rendell
#100. The torment of imprisonment lies in not being able to escape from oneself at any time.
Kobo Abe
