Top 100 Quotes About Oneself
#1. To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery
even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness
is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be.
Andre Breton
#2. Snarky should never be confused with clever ...
(Snarky just showcases immaturity and a need to make other feel small in order to make oneself feel better. Clever shows wit, intelligence and the gift of play on words. Hurtful is as hurtful does and its just wrong.)
Marianne Morea
#3. He never complained. He seemed to have no instinct for the making much of oneself that complaining requires.
Wendell Berry
#5. One must not allow oneself to skid down to isolationism and unbridled economic egoism ... The second possible mistake would be excessive interference into the economic life of the country. And the absolute faith into the all-mightiness of the state.
Vladimir Putin
#6. There is satisfaction in defeating an enemy. But one must never allow oneself to become complacent. There are always more enemies to be identified, faced, and vanquished.
Timothy Zahn
#7. How odd, to suddenly glimpse a facet of me I didn't know existed. I guess it really isn't all that unusual to surprise oneself with an ugly bit of ego.
Ellen Hopkins
#8. The people with the clear heads are the ones who look life in the face, realize that everything in it is problematic, and feel themselves lost. And this is the simple truth: that to live is to feel oneself lost. Those who accept it have already begun to find themselves, to be on firm ground.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#9. In love, one always begins in deceiving oneself, and one always ends in deceiving others.
Oscar Wilde
#10. One doesn't lie down with a lion and get to act surprised if one finds oneself devoured.
Graham Moore
#11. Clever talk is absolutely worthless. All you do in the process is lose yourself. And to lose yourself is a sin. One has to be able to crawl completely inside oneself, like a tortoise.
Hermann Hesse
#12. It is necessary to disassociate oneself from those who would interfere with your success in enlightenment, in your career, in your life. They are not worth it.
Frederick Lenz
#13. mainly that it was important to treat oneself as a kind of stranger, to remain unattached and unprejudiced in your own case.
Zadie Smith
#14. It's a question of not copying the masters, to look for something, good or bad, for oneself. To enter this liberated state of mind, one cannot copy the others.
Nathalie Sarraute
#15. There are only a few things worse than having to face up to the fact that the predicaments one finds oneself in are usually the results of one's own foolish actions.
Jean Ferris
#16. An act of love, a voluntary taking on oneself of some of the pain of the world, increases the courage and love and hope of all.
Dorothy Day
#17. The main shift, you see, is from placing self at the center of our thoughts to putting others there. It is-what do you say?-a paradox that the more we can focus our thoughts on the well-being of others, the happier we become. The first one to benefit is oneself. I call this being wisely selfish.
David Michie
#18. Laughing at someone else is an excellent way of learning how to laugh at oneself; and questioning what seem to be the absurd beliefs of another group is a good way of recognizing the potential absurdity of many of one's own cherished beliefs.
Gore Vidal
#19. Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.
John Updike
#20. Civilization is the art of living together with people not entirely like oneself.
Helen Cam
#21. One's deepest struggles are never with the world, but always with oneself.
Marty Rubin
#22. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared - this must some day become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#24. One must never forbid oneself anything. One must also be able to go back, one must always be able to change ...
Hans Hartung
#25. The bonds of family bind us up, support us, help us. And they are also a bond from which it is difficult, perhaps impossible to extricate oneself.
Neil Gaiman
#26. In every human undertaking there is something which is not in our power and does not come within our calculations; the wish to win this for oneself is the origin of the gods. "Primus in orbe Deos fecit timor" is an old and true saying of Petronius.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#27. How easy it is to hate oneself! True grace is to forget. Yet if pride could die in us, the supreme grace would be to love oneself in all simplicity - as one would love any one of those who themselves have suffered and loved in Christ.
Georges Bernanos
#28. To love oneself is to struggle to rediscover and maintain your uniqueness
Leo Buscaglia
#29. There is nothing worse, is there," she said, "than a past that has never been fully dealt with. One can convince oneself, that it is all safely in the past and forgotten about, but the very fact that we can tell ourselves that it is forgotten proves that it is not.
Mary Balogh
#30. To dye oneself with paints in order to have a rosier or a paler complexion is a lying counterfeit.
Saint Augustine
#31. It takes loneliness in oneself to recognize it in another.
Aimee Carter
#32. To remain virile in the light demands the audacity of a mad ignorance: letting oneself catch fire, screaming with joy, expecting death - because of an unknown, unknowable presence; becoming love and blind light oneself, attaining the perfect incomprehension of the sun.
Georges Bataille
#33. Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.
Elizabeth Bowen
#34. A high or inordinate opinion of one's own dignity, importance, merit, or superiority, whether as cherished in the mind or as displayed in bearing, conduct, etc.; the state or feeling of being proud; a becoming or dignified sense of what is due to oneself or one's position or
L. Velez
#35. Paranoia reduces anxiety and guilt by transferring to the other all the characteristics one does not want to recognize in oneself. It is maintained by selective perception and recall. We only see and acknowledge those negative aspects of the enemy that support the stereotype we have already created.
Sam Keen
#36. Sometimes the child in one behaves a certain way and the rest of oneself follows behind, slowly shaking its head.
Niels Bohr
#37. I am a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he to his heart, I love not the plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still.
And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience - a wandering will be therein, and a mountain-climbing: in the end one experienceth only oneself.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#38. The only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.
David Rakoff
#39. There is no ache more Deadly than the striving to be oneself. - Yevgeniy Vinokurov
Judith Viorst
#40. One must not live one's life through men but must be complete on oneself as a woman of substance.
Helen Fielding
#41. Giving up on God and on oneself constitutes simultaneous surrender to the natural man.
Neal A. Maxwell
#42. Christian love comes from the understanding that there is a unity of divine origins in oneself and in other people, and not only in people, but in all living things.
Leo Tolstoy
#43. Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illumination the fog that surround
Henri Matisse
#44. When one can do better than everyone else in the same walk, one does not make any very painful exertions to outdo oneself. The progress of improvement ceases nearly at the point where competition ends.
William Hazlitt
#45. To benefit by others' killing and to delude oneself into the belief that one is being very religions and nonviolent is sheer self-deception.
Mahatma Gandhi
#46. Somewhat melancholy happiness of offering an object one likes, and that one had bought for oneself!
Herve Guibert
#47. It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.
Virginia Woolf
#48. Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.
Helen Keller
#49. Freedom is something that we got to achieve inside ourselves. Nobody can achieve it outside oneself.
Samael Aun Weor
#50. The place one's in, though, doesn't make any contribution to peace of mind: it's the spirit that makes everything agreeable to oneself.
Seneca The Younger
#51. One of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with oneself and one's life. Even if man had no monetary, or any other reward, he would be eager to spend his energy in some meaningful way because he could not stand the boredom which inactivity produces.
Erich Fromm
#52. Finding oneself and one's path is like waking up on a foggy day. Be patient, and presently the fog will clear and that which has always been there can be seen. The path is already there to follow
Rasheed Ogunlaru
#53. ... one must oneself, in relations with one's friends and allies, embody the society one wishes to create.
David Graeber
#54. Happy! who can answer for that? Happiness or unhappiness is the secret known but to oneself ...
Alexandre Dumas
#55. NO ONE IS CAPABLE OF FREEING ONESELF FROM SOCIETY.
Abdellah Taia
#56. 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
#57. The reading and writing of fiction both requires and instills empathy - the insertion of oneself into the life of another.
Julie Schumacher
#58. True greatness, true leadership, is achieved not by reducing men to one's service but in giving oneself in selfless service to them.
J. Oswald Sanders
#59. Not to like ice cream is to show oneself uninterested in food.
Joseph Epstein
#60. Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself - exactly oneself and no one else - and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else.
Simone De Beauvoir
#61. Literature's view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness,
Salman Rushdie
#62. How sweet is life, can we but choose with whom to live it: to live for oneself is no life.
Menander
#63. To know God and not oneself to be God, to know blessedness and not oneself to enjoy it, is a state of disunity or unhappiness.
Ludwig Feuerbach
#64. I sometimes wonder if the inability to find oneself makes one seek oneself in other people, in characters.
John Cazale
#66. When one is true to oneself, when one is authentic, one becomes true to the evolutionary thrust for self-optimization that exists within oneself and within the universe. And that evolutionary thrust is a continuous unfolding process.
Yasuhiko Kimura
#67. Being in touch with oneself is the meaning of meditation, to be aware of what is going on in your body, in your feelings, in your mind.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#68. One must pray first, but afterwards one must help oneself. God does not care for cowards.
Wanda
Ouida
#69. The problem with carnal anger and outrage is that it's one of the easiest sins to commit while convincing oneself that one is being faithful. The
Russell D. Moore
#71. One needs a great deal of idle time to feel really sorry for oneself.
J.G. Ballard
#72. The main thing is to remain oneself, under any circumstances; that was and is our common purpose.
Madeleine K. Albright
#74. Whenever one feels like saying "the money that billionaire spent on his fleet of yachts could have been used better by the "public sector"", one should ask oneself when was the last time one heard of a billionaire buying an army of tanks and a set of nuclear weapons.
Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski
#75. In France one must adapt oneself to the fragrance of a urinal.
Gertrude Stein
#76. Man's greatest victory is over oneself.
Plato
#77. If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one's life, without seeing oneself in the "mirror" of literature?
Leon Trotsky
#78. To play is to yield oneself to a kind of magic.
Hugo Rahner
#79. To comport oneself with perfect propriety in Polygonal society, one ought to be a Polygon oneself.
Edwin A. Abbott
#80. At night, lying on your back and staring at the falling snow, it's easy to imagine oneself soaring through the stars.
Craig Thompson
#81. To be a gentleman is to be oneself, all of a seam, on camera and off.
Murray Kempton
#82. I surrender to the Monster. What pleasure at last to give way to the strongest force in oneself.
Barry Webster
#83. To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
Oscar Wilde
#84. It was his experience that one did poorly by involving oneself in matters of local religion. The world looked one way if you believed, and another if you did not, and that was all there was to it.
Nick Harkaway
#86. Where have you buried your best days? Have you lived or not? Look, one
says to oneself, look how cold the world is growing.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#88. If your focus in life is on being productive, when things are not happening ... one has to ask oneself, 'Is this worth a grown man's time?'
Bob Corker
#89. Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from him.
Timothy Keller
#90. Dinner alone is one of life's pleasures. Certainly cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest.
Laurie Colwin
#91. The strong equilibrium point f just described is one of "unrelenting ferocity" against offenders. It exhibits a zeal for meting out justice that is entirely oblivious to the sometimes dire consequences to oneself or to the other faitheful i.e., those who have not deviated.
Robert Aumann
#92. I am not interested in repetition. I don't want to reach the point from where I wouldn't know how to go further. It's good to set limits for oneself, but there comes a moment when we must destroy what we have constructed.
Josef Koudelka
#93. It is not easy to fling oneself down stairs in a skirt; there is always the risk that you will tangle your legs and go headlong. But I made it.
Marie Brennan
#94. One must still have chaos within oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
Nietszche
#95. The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.
Colum McCann
#96. Ah, we have to be generous to be grateful ... One has oneself to be a giver.
Ivy Compton-Burnett
#97. Hard work and results should be recognized by others, but when they aren't, advocating for oneself becomes necessary. As discussed earlier, this must be done with great care. But it must be done.
Sheryl Sandberg
#98. It certainly takes bravery to remain skeptical; it takes inordinate courage to introspect, to confront oneself, to accept one's limitations
Scientists are seeing more and more evidence that we are specifically designed by mother nature to fool ourselves.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#99. What she tells the Japanese is this lost opportunity which has made her what she is.
The story she tells of this lost opportunity literally transports her outside herself and carries her toward this new man.
To give oneself, body and soul, that's it.
Marguerite Duras
#100. To take the measure of oneself by reference to one's colleagues leads to envy or complacency rather than constructive self-examination.
Benno C. Schmidt Jr.
