Top 100 Human Self Quotes
#1. I regard myself as a religious ... the temper of my mind as religious, and because I regard the temper of my mind as religious, I am profoundly skeptical about any form of human authority, any form of human self-importance.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#2. The attempt to force human beings to despise themselves is what I call hell.
Andre Malraux
#3. She would never be caught unprepared again, she swore to herself. She would never trust. Never love. Never put faith in other human beings again. She would learn all she could of the shape and substance of the world, and she would find a way to survive in it.
David Anthony Durham
#4. No matter how much you want to be self-sufficient and alone, there is a natural human impulse to need something more than that.
Jonathan E. Steinberg
#5. The strike and the boycott, they have cost us much. What they have not paid us in wages, better working conditions, and new contracts, they have paid us in self-respect and human dignity.
Cesar Chavez
#6. The biggest secret of self-esteem is this: Begin to appreciate other people more; show respect for any human being merely because he is a child of God and therefore a thing of value.
Maxwell Maltz
#7. At midlife, you're pregnant with the best self you can be - someone who has learned enough from both successes and failures to add up to a fine human being.
Marianne Williamson
#8. Between what human beings so naively and stupidly fear and what they most profoundly ought to fear-i.e. what they so pathogenically and addictively do to their own selves-there is a horrendous gulf and disparity.
Kenny Smith
#9. Quite possibly the only infinite power in the universe may be the human capacity for self-deception.
Michel Templet
#10. We admire elephants in part because they demonstrate what we consider the finest human traits: empathy, self-awareness, and social intelligence. But the way we treat them puts on display the very worst of human behavior.
Graydon Carter
#11. I think that we've made great moral progress in the second half of the 20th century in many respects, and particularly in relation to human rights but I think that we are losing sight of some of the values of concern for others, and self-respect and respect for others.
Alexander McCall Smith
#12. From human problems come human solutions, which in turn spawn inspiration, creativity, insight and enlightenment. Without life's problems, life would become stagnant, dull and boring.
Beth Johnson
#13. But, it has something to do with having belief in a human future and what that human future is. What is the future of humanity? How does this whole experiment not self-destruct with the environment and everything else going on?
Brit Marling
#14. Humanity as a whole has already gone through unimaginable suffering, mostly self-inflicted, the culmination of which was the 20th century with its unspeakable horrors. This collective suffering has brought upon a readiness in many human beings for the evolutionary leap that is spiritual awakening.
Eckhart Tolle
#16. A look into the Human Mind..of how we perceive..How can we see beauty in and around us..Not the correction of evil or pursuit of the virtuous..BUT..pleasure that resides in the Sense of Self !! A Self living in a state of 'nothingness' and beauty as it lies there..from that place! Simple and Deft
Abha Maryada Banerjee
#17. Prolonged stress causes the human body to make adaptations so it can continue to serve you at a functional level. The more stress, the more adaptations.
Janet Gallagher Nestor
#18. Very often human beings don't become available for the purposes of art until they have shaken off some of their dogged, self-preserving sanity.
Christopher Morley
#19. We didn't need light & shade, irony or humor. An iconic Daltrey bellow could convey an extrodinary range of human emotion; withering sadness, self pity, loneliness, abandonment, spiritual desperation, the loss of childhood, as well as the more obvious rage & frustration, joy & triumph.
Pete Townshend
#20. Rational egoism is the only morality that is for human life; thus, it is the only morality that is actually moral. Those who choose to be rationally self-interested thereby make the most of their life - and they are morally good because of it.
Craig Biddle
#21. All positive interactions with other human beings involve, to some degree, the experience of visibility
that is, the experience of being seen and understood.
Nathaniel Branden
#22. The more a human being feels himself a self, tries to intensify this self and reach a never-attainable perfection, the more drastically he steps out of the center of being.
Eugen Herrigel
#23. In fact, there is perhaps only one human being in a thousand who is passionately interested in his job for the job's sake. The difference is that if that one person in a thousand is a man, we say, simply, that he is passionately keen on his job; if she is a woman, we say she is a freak.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#24. Each human being can at once be a fighter and forgiver. When self-doubt tortures him, he most play the role of a fighter. And when his own ignorance humiliates him, he must play the role of a forgiver.
Sri Chinmoy
#25. Person-centred counselling may be thought of as 'not enough'. In my experience it is. It allows for self-determination through an acknowledgement of a person's human rights.
Suzanne Keys
#26. Christ tears away the wall of partition, the self-love, the dividing prejudice of nationality, and teaches a love for all the human family.
Ellen G. White
#27. We are like water, aren't we? We can be fluid, flexible when we have to be. But strong and destructive, too. And something else, I think to myself. Like water, we mostly follow the path of least resistance.
Wally Lamb
#28. You are not a human being. You are not your body, you are not your mind, and you are not your soul. These are things that You have. The You that has these things - indeed, that has given your Self these things - is far bigger than any of them, and even all of them put together.
Neale Donald Walsch
#29. For me, writing post-apocalyptic novels isn't so much about exploding helicopters and fifty-megaton doomsday bombs as it is about the pleasure of dealing with the best of everything that makes us human: cleverness, grit, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.
Jeff Carlson
#30. Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.
Franz Kafka
#31. It's self-centered to think that human beings, as limited as we are, can describe divinity.
John Templeton
#32. In a human development sense, our understanding of leadership has essentially "grown up" and moved past personal ego and a self-centered view of things.
Linda Fisher Thornton
#33. For human nature is strange: the less we are inclined to self-sacrifice, the more we insist on it in others.
Boleslaw Prus
#34. Nationalism is form of collective narcissism, where the citizens possess an inflated self-love of "their own people," to the exclusion of other human beings.
Bryant McGill
#35. Spiritual formation for the Christian basically refers to the Spirit-driven process of forming the inner world of the human self in such a way that it becomes like the inner being of Christ himself.
Dallas Willard
#36. You do not have the right to take another human's life, unless it's in strict self-defense.
Michael Moore
#37. The buying of a self-help book is the most desperate of all human acts. It means you've lost your mind completely: You've entrusted your mental health to a self-aggrandizing twit with a psychology degree and a yen for a yacht.
Cynthia Heimel
#38. The human body is a miraculous self-healing machine, but those self-repair systems require a nutrient-dense diet.
Joel Fuhrman
#39. Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.
David Quammen
#40. We must be able to love other people or forever endure the stain of disgraceful loneliness. By recognizing and expressing empathy for other people, we come to accept our own fallibility.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#41. There are teachers who say that one of the main obstacles, spiritual obstacles, for westerners is a sense of unworthiness, a self-limiting sense of what's possible for them in a human life.
Roland Merullo
#42. All artists are self-sacrificing human beings, and to become an artist is nothing but to devote oneself to the subterranean gods.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#43. How silly then to imagine that the human mind, which is formed of the same elements as divine beings, objects to movement and change of abode, while the divine nature finds delight and even self-preservation in continual and very rapid change.
Seneca.
#44. Thinking beyond the human condition often transcends us from it.
Gary Hopkins
#45. The human spirit and self-esteem are compromised when you lay down your arms to the pressures of society in a rat race.
Mayank Sharma
#46. The person who wishes to attain human perfection should study logic first, next mathematics, then physics, and, lastly, metaphysics.
Maimonides
#47. Fear and self-doubt have always been the greatest enemies of human potential.
Brian Tracy
#48. Personal disillusionment accompanied by self-pity and self-loathing are the Achilles' heel of modern humankind, representing the weakness of the human spirit.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#49. The ultimate resources are EMOTIONAL STATES:
Creativity, decisiveness, passion, honesty, sincerity, love
these are the ultimate human resources and when you engage these resources you can get any other resource on earth.
Tony Robbins
#50. How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.
Yann Martel
#51. Feeling sorry for yourself is a universal solvent of salvation.
Paul Hoffman
#52. I like Muhammad a lot, because he's like us more than anybody else. Jesus is just so exalted, and Buddha is just so exalted, it's almost beyond our reach. Muhammad is more human, more self-doubting, even self-tortured at times.
Deepak Chopra
#53. What is the goal of a human being? An Indian person can truly achieve a state of the Absolute Supreme Self [Parmatma, the Lord]. To achieve one's own Absolute Supreme Self state is the ultimate goal!
Dada Bhagwan
#54. The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.
John Foster Dulles
#55. Titles are like a magicians wand which circumscribe human facility and prevent us from living the lives of man.
Thomas Paine
#56. For now, we assume that self-evolving robots will learn to mimic human traits, including, eventually, humor. And so, I can't wait to hear the first joke that one robot tells to another robot.
Lance Morrow
#57. Orito pictures the human mind as a loom that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception.
David Mitchell
#58. The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.
Quentin Crisp
#59. We have a duty to look after each other. If we lose control of our government, then we lose our ability to dispense justice and human kindness. Our first priority today, then, is to defeat utterly those forces of greed and corruption that have come between us and our self-governance.
Doris "Granny D" Haddock
#60. Crime is a human behavior problem, not a mechanical problem. Furthermore, if firearms were not very useful for self-defense, then police wouldn't carry them. In a free country, if the government can go armed, so should the citizens, if they so choose.
Charley Reese
#61. We have developed a culture of self-interest, self-gratification, self-aggrandizement, and utter selfishness. We have institutionalized and disseminated these values as never before in human history.
Michael C. Hill
#62. The unmet need that can get met right now is the need to be whole, to be both your magnificent, divine self and your imperfect, human self.
Debbie Ford
#63. Marcie: I know you're still wounded. Danny, you have to let it go. That is what this mind game is all about, discovering who we are.
Humans lie to themselves all the time. There should be no disgrace in being human, that is what I believe.
Andrew Neff
#64. The human heart is evil, absolutely. That is why self-discipline is a virtue. Once you open the floodgates of corruption, there's no stopping it.
B.C. Chase
#65. The secret of human happiness is not in self-seeking but in self-forgetting.
Theodor Reik
#66. Self-restraint may be alien to the human temperament, but humanity without restraint will dig its own grave.
Marya Mannes
#67. Neither woman nor man lives by work, or love, alone ... The human self defines itself and grows through love and work: All psychology before and after Freud boils down to that.
Betty Friedan
#68. Human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.
Albert Einstein
#69. If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.
George Lakoff
#70. That's exactly the good thing about the Injun life
you don't have to stop and think about whether or not you're 'happy'
which in my opinionis a highly overrated human condition invented by white folks
Jim Fergus
#71. Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead.
Idries Shah
#72. Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often - and in my inmost self perhaps all the time - I doubt whether I am a human being.
Franz Kafka
#73. Self-control is a big deal in human performance. Getting better depends upon it. You cannot get better if it's not you who has to get better. You are the performer, period. You are the only thing you can control.
Henry Cloud
#74. It is a curiosity of human nature that lack of self-assurance seems to breed an exaggerated sense of power and mission.
J. William Fulbright
#75. As we begin to plan for a new human society, we need to foster common values about clean air, water, and other elements of self-sustenance. These, along with a complete inventory of Earth's resources, will form the basis for a holistic approach to cybernated decision-making.
Jacque Fresco
#76. Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#77. The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self- dependence must give each individual the right to choose his own surroundings.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#78. To the Maker the archetype, the self-sustainer, human interaction is usually a waste of the most precious thing in his vital existance: time.
Anton Szandor LaVey
#79. The human brain has a natural ability, inherent in its mechanism, to work on many levels, in a process of constant promptings, in a type of self-preservation.
If only humans understood ...
Most ignore it.
Amanda Dubin
#80. "Heaven" refers to the realm that is the interior part of a human being, and that the "divine self" is none other than the selfless light existing in our innermost depths.
Masahisa Goi
#81. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity.
Aung San Suu Kyi
#83. The human heart is so steeped in self-deception that it can easily outrun its own lies. It can use even meticulous honesty as a form of dishonesty, a way of saying to God, "Look how honest I am.
Andrew Klavan
#84. Constancy, far from being a virtue, seems often to be the besetting sin of the human race, daughter of laziness and self-sufficiency, sister of sleep, the cause of most wars and practically all persecutions.
Freya Stark
#85. Science is the only self-correcting human institution, but it also is a process that progresses only by showing itself to be wrong.
Allan Sandage
#86. Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.
Irvin D. Yalom
#87. Find joy in simplicity, self-respect, and indifference to what lies between virtue and vice. Love the human race. Follow the divine.
Marcus Aurelius
#88. Is this narcissism? Solipsism? Idiocy (from the Greek word idios, for self)? Would Turing acknowledge it as a proof of human behavior? Well, perhaps. They drove Turing to suicide too.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#89. She was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal comprehension.
Joseph Conrad
#90. ... Our sunsets have been reduced to wavelengths and frequencies. The complexities of the universe have been shredded into mathematical equations. Even our self-worth as human beings has been destroyed.
Dan Brown
#91. There is something simply beautiful and simply innocent, in being human. It is just so innocent and beautiful. I love it.
C. JoyBell C.
#92. Human self-understanding changes with time, and so also human consciousness deepens.
Pope Francis
#93. I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
#94. In spite of her desire for a contained universe, her life felt scattered, full of many small moments, without great purpose. That is what she thought, though what is most untrustworthy about our natures and self-worth is how we differe in our own realities from the way we are seen by others.
Michael Ondaatje
#95. The philosophical I is not the human being, not the human body or the human soul with the psychological properties, but the metaphysical subject, the boundary (not a part) of the world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#96. The talent for self-justification is surely the finest flower of human evolution, the greatest achievement of the human brain. When it comes to justifying actions, every human being acquires the intelligence of an Einstein, the imagination of a Shakespeare, and the subtlety of a Jesuit.
Michael Foley
#97. And as I looked, it became very clear that this five-and-ten-cent ship was in some way connected with human pretensions. This suffocating interior of a dime-store ship was my own personal self; these gimcrack mobiles of tin and plastic were my personal contributions to the universe.
Aldous Huxley
#98. The squirrel, jumping from limb to limb, trust his nature like no human ever could.
Garry Fitchett
#99. The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle: That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
- David Foster Wallace, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness" (2005)
David Foster Wallace
#100. Meeting the "self" activates the transformation of human consciousness,
Caroline Myss
