Quotes About Self And Nature

#1. But at three, four, five, and even six years the childish nature will require sports; now is the time to get rid of self-will in him, punishing him, but not so as to disgrace him.

Plato

#2. Personal Assault and Battery breeds with no contraception a hateful vengeance for others; A sexual nature that is methodically breeding one's intolerance of Self

Rosemarie Yusen

#3. Enlightenment is when there is no personal self, only the Creative Self, which is universal and impersonal in nature. It is when the personal self or personality is no longer the point of reference, but rather it becomes a tool to realize the True Self and to do its Creative Will.

David Cherubim

#4. I think that in today's world, by nature, we are all self-centered. And that often leads to selfishness.

Gary Chapman

#5. 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

#6. He stood at the edge of town feeling very small, powerless. Night in the mountains could do that to you, reminding you of your place in the world and laughing at any sense of self-importance.

Michael Koryta

#7. A more truthful perception may be seen from the perspective of the whole - what we really are, beyond names, roles, education, religion and other information added to our true nature.

Ilchi Lee

#8. The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#9. 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

#10. Master Yourself and you master your environment! Such is the nature of wisdom.

D. Nicole Williams

#11. My real nature, my real self, wanted that person to believe in me, to see the good, ignore the bad, and make me feel like I had a future.

Karina Halle

#12. The mind itself is of the form of all, i.e., of soul, God and world; when it becomes of the form of the Self through knowledge, there is release, which is of the nature of Brahman: this is the teaching.

Ramana Maharshi

#13. When you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you discover one thread that winds through them all. They have been aligned first with their spiritual nature and only then with their physical selves.

Albert Einstein

#14. If the ego is not regularly and repeatedly dissolved in the unbounded hyperspace of the Transcendent Other, there will always be slow drift away from the sense of self as part of nature's larger whole. The ultimate consequence of this drift is the fatal ennui that now permeates Western Civilization.

Terence McKenna

#15. 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.

#16. The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.

Maurice Merleau Ponty

#17. As we increase in our awareness and our integration of Self the process of integration grows and expands as we begin to incorporate the fullness of our nature, that of our spiritual nature or our Soul.

Genevieve

#18. One good, compassionate and caring Self is a thousand times greater than all the fanciful, imaginary supernatural entities in the world.

Abhijit Naskar

#19. 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

#20. Be thou what thou singly art and personate only thyself. Swim smoothly in the stream of thy nature and live but one man.

Thomas Browne

#21. So it does turn out that we do need to begin by contemplating the profound nature of self and other. Because if you change the leaves and branches but leave the roots intact, you run the risk of reverting to type.

Norman Fischer

#22. When we first believe we think we can do it all; our passion is so strong. But after a time we start to learn that passion doesn't equal strength, and our sinful nature rears its ugly head.

Hayley DiMarco

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. Nature battles against us sometimes, and it can be hard. Our souls seek a soul mate and our bodies seek to procreate. You need to be wise and self controlled and not put yourself in a place where nature might overcome your commonsense.

M.H. Strom

#26. If people were not by nature insane and resistant to self-improvement or therapy,

Jeff VanderMeer

#27. 80% of man's happiness is based on love - love for others, love for self, love for family, love for friends, love for work, love for nature, and love for being loved.

Ogwo David Emenike

#28. There is sorrow in finitude. The Self is beyond time, space and objects. It is infinite and hence of the nature of absolute happiness.

Adi Shankara

#29. Enlightenment comes when you understand the language of heart - the language of tree, birds and the nature.

Amit Ray

#30. Thoreau and Huxley calmly state what I have spent years trying to articulate, and never found the words for doing so. To read the words of these great men is to read the highest expression of my very self which is inexpressible due to the shortcomings of my particular nature.

Chris Matakas

#31. It is man's social nature which distinguishes him from the brute creation. If it is his privilege to be independent, it is equally his duty to be inter-dependent. Only an arrogant man will claim to be independent of everybody else and be self-contained.

Mahatma Gandhi

#32. The understanding is universal, pantheistic, the love of the universe; but the grand characteristic of religion, and of the Christian religion especially, is that it is thoroughly anthropotheistic, the exclusive love of man for himself, the exclusive self-affirmation of the human nature.

Ludwig Feuerbach

#33. You cannot simply tap your creative nature once and then expect to be done with it. It is a lifelong process: a continual commitment to being open to possibility, trusting your instincts, experimenting, taking risks, and revising.

Fran Sorin

#34. Heydrich, Eichmann, and company therefore invoke the usual trick of argument for breaking a true continuum that lacks a compelling point for separation: choose an arbitrary dividing line and then treat it as a self-evident law of nature.

Stephen Jay Gould

#35. But there is a devil of a difference between barbarians who are fit by nature to be used for anything, and civilized people who apply them selves to everything.

Karl Marx

#36. Perceiving your own voice means perceiving your true self or nature. When you and the sound become one, you don't hear the sound; you are the sound.

Seung Sahn

#37. Freedom is the process of allowing myself to acknowledge the nature of my soul and to embrace my humanity. It is when I acknowledge how much power I have to create, shape, and change my life.

Cynthia Belmer

#38. The witness of the three states of consciousness [waking, dream and deep sleep] and of the nature of Existence-Consciousness-Bliss is the Self

Adi Shankara

#39. The beauty in the losing is a loss finally of self-consciousness. There's a gorgeous moment that can happen in all kinds of places. It can happen with people, it can happen with nature, and it can happen with my eyes shut anywhere I am.

Barbara Brown Taylor

#40. The way in which the twists were entangled to knot up the mind-speech-body and the innate nature (relative self, prakruti), is the manner in which they will be untwisted.

Dada Bhagwan

#41. Human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it renders everything asunder, the wall, and the bonds and its very self.

Kafka, Franz

#42. I think people have always misinterpreted my self-destructive nature as nihilistic, because if you don't care about the world, you can't create art. I am misanthropic and self-loathing, but never nihilistic. And I think I act far worse off-stage than onstage.

Marilyn Manson

#43. It is a glorious occupation, vivifying and self-sustaining in its nature, to struggle with ignorance, and discover to the inquiring minds of the masses the clear cerulean blue of heavenly truth.

Hosea Ballou

#44. Lifestyles are routined practices, the routines incorporated into habits of dress, eating, modes of acting and favoured milieux for encountering others; but the routines followed are reflexively open to change in the light of the mobile nature of self-identity.

Anthony Giddens

#45. When you embrace a sacred relationship with your inner witch, you awaken within you qualities of the elements and forces of nature. This is the discovery and the connection of your powerful self.

Dacha Avelin

#46. KNOWING SELF SOUL GOD CREATIVE ESSENCE TASTE LEADS TO MATURED GLANCE OF MYSTERIES OF NATURE AND UNIVERSAL FUTURE ACTIVITY NEXT.

Various

#47. What is life but God's daring invitation to a remarkable journey? And what is human nature but a staunchly inbred tendency toward self-preservation? And because of the rigidly paradoxical nature of these things, the road of life is seldom trod beyond a few scant steps.

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#48. A remark of my brother's apropos of the troubles and pains our mother endured: "Old age is nature's self-criticism.

Emil M. Cioran

#49. They thought man was a creature of rapacious self-interest, and yet they wanted him to be free- free, in essence, to contend, to engage in an umpired strife, to use property to get property.

Richard Hofstadter

#50. Consciousness has power to create physical changes and requires no other medium than itself. It can reach the entire universe, inferring that consciousness energy is the very nature of the universe.

Ilchi Lee

#51. I know many people who believe in God, and I expected to find Him on my way to the South Pole if he exists. My religious experiences were very different however, [only] involving myself, nature and the universe.

Liv Arnesen

#52. Even if this advice to portfolio decision makers to drop dead is good advice, it obviously is not counsel that will be eagerly followed. Few people will commit suicide without a push. And fewer still will pay good money to be told to do what is against human nature and self-interest to do.

Paul Samuelson

#53. If you are stealing people's thunder just by being around and standing there; you really can't expect people to like you. People want their own thunder to be heard loud and wide, not yours! Swans should never despair over ducks not liking them.

C. JoyBell C.

#54. My opinion is that we must lend ourselves to others and give ourselves only to ourselves. If my will happened to be prone to mortgage and attach itself, I would not last: I am too tender, both by nature and by practice.

Michel De Montaigne

#55. Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature such as self preservation? (CIA Document, Project ARTICHOKE, MORI ID 144686, 1952)
As cited by Dr Ellen P. Lacter, p57

Orit Badouk Epstein

#56. If you don't know yourself, you don't know your nature. If you don't know your nature, you don't know where to exist. By knowing your nature, knowing yourself, you know what to be and how to live. And that only comes from knowledge of self, knowing yourself.

RZA

#57. Man is dragged hither and thither, at one moment by the blind instincts of the forest, at the next by the strange intuitions of a higher self whose rationale he doubts and does not understand.

Loren Eiseley

#58. I hate you, I thought, I hate you with your bloody nature-boy airs and your bloody forced-march voyage of bloody discovery. I wondered then if Finn's personality worked on everyone, or whether I had just the the right sort of mentality to fall in step with a self-centered hermit-boy crab murderer.

Meg Rosoff

#59. For just as the first general precepts of the law of nature are self-evident to one in possession of natural reason, and have no need of promulgation, so also that of believing in God is primary and self-evident to one who has faith: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is.

Thomas Aquinas

#60. We can reach untainted experiential freedom, by living in the moment as it is - without contemplation. Here we find the possibility of freedom - of just being - living as our authentic self. We are our true nature. We are one and whole.

Jacqueline Simon Gunn

#61. We have a habit of turning to scientists when we want factual answers and artists when we want entertainment, but where are the facts about the nature of the self? Neurologists peering at PET scans and fMRIs know they aren't seeing the soul in there.

James Gleick

#62. If they want me to have mysticism, okay, I've got it.
I'm a mystic, but only in my body,
My soul is simple and doesn't think.

Alberto Caeiro

#63. We cannot doubt that self-interest is the mainspring of human nature. It must be clearly understood that this word is used here to designate a universal, incontestable fact, resulting from the nature of man, and not an adverse judgment, as would be the word selfishness.

Frederic Bastiat

#64. What is the nature of the Self (Soul)? To 'see' the dharma (function) of everything, to see 'who is performing what function, and how that function is being performed.' To 'see' it, is called the function of the Self (Soul).

Dada Bhagwan

#65. Human nature means battling constantly between being completely self-absorbed and trying to be a communal creature. Nature makes you a communal creature. The ultimate single-minded, self-centered creature is a cancer cell. And mostly, we're not made up of cancer cells.

George Lucas

#66. Faith itself has no merit; in fact, by its nature it is self-emptying. It involves our complete renunciation of any confidence in our own righteousness and a relying entirely on the perfect righteousness and death of Christ.

Jerry Bridges

#67. Looking deeper, I see not subjugation, but a tool of power to control my fate in the world of man that symbolizes my ownership over both my nature spirit and wolf-self.

Jazz Feylynn

#68. Let us die as soon as possible, and by whatever process God shall appoint. And when we are dead to the world, and nature, and self, we shall begin to live to God.

Adoniram Judson

#69. The very discovery of these hidden things is in itself a purifying experience! The soul needs to discover what is inside. The self nature needs to see what it really is, and what it is like-right to the very bottom.

Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon

#70. There is no boon in nature. All the blessings we enjoy are the fruits of labor, toil, self-denial, and study.

William Graham Sumner

#71. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and of the concepts of liberty, freedom, and self-determination. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. He (Obama) believes that the pie is fixed and that he needs to more equitably divide up the slices.

Paul Ryan

#72. In marriage, we're called to reflect God's love for us through our self-giving love for our spouse. God's love for us isn't dependent on our day-to-day feelings toward him, on how hard we work to please him, or even on how faithful we are to him. It's grounded in his nature and his covenant.

Matthew Vines

#73. The revolution must end and the republic must begin. In our constitution, right must take the place of duty, welfare that of virtue, and self-defense that of punishment. Everyone must be able to prevail and to live according to one's own nature.

Georg Buchner

#74. It seems to me self-evident that we cannot have capitalism without capital and, very importantly, that the ultimate source of all economic capital is Nature's capital

Prince Charles

#75. Conscience is the absolute truthfulness perceived, which comes from Nothing, our true nature, and as such reflects things exactly the way they are.

Ilchi Lee

#76. The snow itself is lonely or, if you prefer, self-sufficient. There is no other time when the whole world seems composed of one thing and one thing only.

Joseph Wood Krutch

#77. Live in the wisdom of accepted tenderness. Tenderness awakens within the security of knowing we are thoroughly and sincerely liked by someone ...
Scripture suggests that the essence of the divine nature is compassion and that the heart of God is defined by tenderness.

Brennan Manning

#78. All nature, then, as self-sustained, consists
Of twain of things: of bodies and of void
In which they're set, and where they're moved around.

Lucretius

#79. The serenity produced by the contemplation and philosophy of nature is the only remedy for prejudice, superstition, and inordinate self-importance, teaching us that we are all a part of Nature herself, strengthening the bond of sympathy which should exist between ourselves and our brother man ...

Luther Burbank

#80. Happy insect! what can be In happiness compared to thee? Fed with nourishment divine, The dewy morning's gentle wine! Nature waits upon thee still, And thy verdant cup does fill; 'Tis fill'd wherever thou dost tread, Nature's self's thy Ganymede.

Abraham Cowley

#81. True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, in the enjoyment of one's self, and, in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.

Joseph Addison

#82. The ego is the product of imagination. It is how a human being sees himself or herself. It makes humans demand special status in nature and culture. Nature does not care for this self-image of human beings. Culture, which is a man-made creation, attempts to accommodate it.

Devdutt Pattanaik

#83. The liberating encounter with God/ess is always an encounter with our authentic selves resurrected from underneath the alienated self. It is not experienced against, but in and through relationships, healing our broken relations with our bodies, with other people, with nature.

Rosemary Radford Ruether

#84. Thus he has two standpoints from which he can consider himself...: first, as belonging to the world of sense, under the laws of nature (heteronomy), and, second, as belonging to the intelligible world under laws which, independent of nature, are not empirical but founded only on reason.

Immanuel Kant

#85. Freedom is not synonymous with an easy life ... There are many difficult things about freedom: It does not give you safety, it creates moral dilemmas for you; it requires self-discipline; it imposes great responsibilities; but such is the nature of Man and in such consists his glory and salvation.

Margaret Thatcher

#86. Bealer has a number of reasons for thinking that a naturalistic epistemology is self-undermining. Let me focus on one of these. (I've tried to take on all of them in the first chapter of Knowledge and Its Place in Nature.)

Hilary Kornblith

#87. Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business: and gives in the long run a net result of zero.

Thomas Carlyle

#88. Day after day, more and more medications are prescribed for depression and addiction, assuming that these things run in our blood, when really they run in our patterns of awareness.

Vironika Tugaleva

#89. Our environment, including the physical body, reflect our inner state - what we are inwardly, our eternal nature. When we renew our mind and transform ourselves, our environment responds to this change automatically.

Thomas Vazhakunnathu

#90. God would be knowable as an infinite progression from ignorance into higher levels of knowledge and insight about the nature of self and reality.

Erik Lenderman

#91. The awe-inspiring beauty of nature is nothing more than being flabbergasted by our ignorance of it. Good art produces the same effect; and the worst thing an artist can do is to follow the herd, because domesticated art is about as dynamic as a domesticated animal.

Anthony Marais

#92. It was part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers.

Thomas Hardy

#93. Good breeding is the result of good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial for the sake of others.

Lord Chesterfield

#94. Self-love then does not constitute THIS or THAT to be our interest or good; but, our interest or good being constituted by nature and supposed, self-love only puts us upon obtaining and securing it.

Joseph Butler

#95. (U)derneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us.

Northrop Frye

#96. When you believe the truth about yourself, the truth that people are created to solve problems and overcome the limitations of their nature you make a name for yourself

Sunday Adelaja

#97. The true beauty of nature is her amplitude; she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our nuclear arsenals cannot threaten (much as we can easily destroy our puny selves).

Stephen Jay Gould

#98. There are no ordinary people. The blur or everyday reality has created a world in which most of us have forgotten our unique and sacred existence ... it is [our] true self, once discovered, that enables us to understand more clearly the nature of our world, and our own existence.

Kim Chestney

#99. We have broken down the self-respecting spirit of man with nursery tales and priestly threats, and we dare to assert, that inproportion as we have prostrated our understanding and degraded our nature, we have exhibited virtue, wisdom, and happiness, in our words, our actions, and our lives!

Frances Wright

#100. Where nature is sovereign, there is no need of austerity and self-denial.

James Anthony Froude