Top 100 Self Indulgent Quotes
#1. Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn't turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.
Bill Bryson
#2. Evil is boring. Cynicism is pointless. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Hopelessness is self-indulgent. On the other hand: Joy is fascinating. Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is our birthright. Chronic ecstasy is a learnable skill.
Rob Brezsny
#3. An artist is somebody that puts themselves in a room, they're a wee bit self-indulgent and you know, sink into their music and it [will] be a very personal experience. An entertainer was somebody that took their God-given talent and shared it with people. And I've always wanted to be an entertainer.
Johnny Reid
#5. Music, for me, is completely self-indulgent. I write it, I play the instruments, I arrange it, I produce it. It's all about me - as it should be.
Lenny Kravitz
#6. "Look into thy heart and write!" is good advice, but not if interpreted to mean, "Look nowhere else!" The poet should know his world and, so far as his art is concerned, any kind of battering from his world is better than his own self-indulgent brooding.
Harriet Monroe
#7. I have sometimes done cartoons that are hurtful to people - immature, spiteful stuff. Some are so self-indulgent, and some have just failed. I look back and sometimes cringe. But one regret as I get older is that I haven't been radical and wild enough.
Michael Leunig
#8. History will remember the inhabitants of this century as the people who went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years, only to languish for the next 30 in low Earth orbit. At the core of the risk-free society is a self-indulgent failure of nerve.
Buzz Aldrin
#9. Have you fallen into the world's trap, following its self-indulgent goals and driven by its self-centered motives? It can happen without you even being aware of it. Make sure Christ is first in your life, and make it your goal to live according to His Word.
Billy Graham
#10. I think people get bored of grief," said Natasha. "It's like you're allowed some unspoken allotted time - six months maybe - and then they get faintly irritated that you're not 'better,' like you're being self-indulgent hanging on to your unhappiness.
Jojo Moyes
#11. I do not look on self-indulgent, sensual people as worthy of my hatred; I simply look upon them with contempt for their poorness of character.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#12. Child never allowed to give would surely become a self-indulgent adult, his happiness dependent upon whatever was put into his outstretched palm.
Lawana Blackwell
#13. Above all, the listener should be able to understand the poem or the song, not be forced to unravel a complicated, self-indulgent puzzle. Offer your art up to the whole world, not just an elite few.
Lucinda Williams
#14. It was a stark choice: shoes or food; beauty or sustenance; the sensible or the self-indulgent. "I'll take the shoes," she said firmly.
Alexander McCall Smith
#15. All her years of maturity had been devoted either to distorting or side-stepping the less agreeable facts motivating her self-indulgent conduct.
Thorne Smith
#16. Why should self-indulgent nonsense - whatever its professed political orientation - be lauded as the height of scholarly achievement?
Alan Sokal
#17. My primary assessment would be because American Christians tend to be incredibly self-indulgent, so they see the church as a place there for them to meet their needs and to express faith in a way that is meaningful for them.
Erwin McManus
#18. Let me offer this apology. Please excuse this self-indulgent preface. I know what I am doing. I am presenting a series of reasons as to why you should lower your expectations, so that you can be blown away by my sneaky insights about life and work. I am a grown woman. I know my own tricks!
Amy Poehler
#19. His own family regarded Robert as one of those quietly self-indulgent people who live rather secret lives because they find themselves thereby less burdened by having to think of others.
Anthony Powell
#20. Periods of inactivity, I don't know such things. I'm consistently writing. My life is busy. It always is. There are hardly any moments for self-indulgent laziness.
John Lydon
#21. Beware of any belief that makes you self-indulgent; it came from the pit, no matter how beautiful it sounds.
Oswald Chambers
#22. For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.
Diablo Cody
#23. I've been very self-indulgent and weird and I'm sorry. But I'd really like to die.
Frederick Busch
#24. I bristle at the implication that only with the help of a Big Six editor does a novel lose its self-indulgent aspects. Before the advent of self-publishing, there were plenty of self-indulgent novels on the shelves.
Jennifer Armintrout
#25. There's an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it's self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It's not a tool to understand myself.
Michael Pollan
#26. People don't listen to karaoke, they endure it until it is their turn. It is the singularly most self-indulgent form of entertainment available.
Will Ferguson
#27. He had begun the diary less as a record of his life (for whom and why? What life?) than as a regular and self-indulgent exploration, a means of makings sense of the past years, part catharsis, part comforting affirmation.
P.D. James
#28. I feel like people are starting to come around and embrace rock. Because I guess they're getting sick of the stale sounds of certain electronica. They kind of get really bored with the fact that it's so self-indulgent.
Jason Reece
#29. We need, then, to protect a time and a place for timeless time, and to remind ourselves continually that this is not self-indulgent but rather crucial to intellectual work. If we don't find timeless time, there is evidence that not only our work but also our brains will suffer.
Maggie Berg
#30. Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute; we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to light and to invent technology that has made us immeasurably more effective.
Karen Armstrong
#31. I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.
Audre Lorde
#32. You just can't complain about being alive. It's self-indulgent to be unhappy. When asked how she has coped since husband's death.
Gena Rowlands
#33. We have become a society where the artist is regarded as a self-indulgent superfluity, and the person who juggles stocks and shares is an essential part of the economy.
Pam Brown
#34. Societies don't become less self-indulgent; people do.
Mal Fletcher
#35. Dad was thirsty, not given to great displays of affection, like his father and his father's father before him. A long line of self-indulgent men who couldn't give love but lived to take it, which isn't the same as receiving it. They were all in so much pain and that's always the perfect excuse.
Courtney Summers
#36. Traditional autobiography has generally had a poor press. The novelist Daphne du Maurier condemned all examples of this literary form as self-indulgent. Others have quipped that autobiography reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.
Craig Venter
#37. This is so much better than the 60's. So much less self indulgent and desperate. What you have here is a large group of people trying to practice unconditional love for strangers, and for the most part, succeeding.
John Perry Barlow
#38. poet convinced both of his own talent and of the need to be self-indulgent in order to be a great artist.
Walter Isaacson
#39. Without trying to get too self-indulgent, there's a fine line between making something that's soundtracky and cinematic, or making it sound like a bad 70s prog-rock record.
Jason Reece
#40. The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong, only the industrious, only the determined, only the courageous, only the visionary who determine the real nature of our struggle can possibly survive.
John F. Kennedy
#41. You will eat not to satisfy your palate but your hunger. A self-indulgent man lives to eat; a self-restrained man eats to live.
Mahatma Gandhi
#42. I can't believe I told you all those things and we've ended up talking about how great I am.'
'But we're not. You've confused the two thnigs again. You're not great. You're a shallow, feckless, self-indulgent... wanker.'
'Thanks.
Nick Hornby
#43. People think it's suspect and self-indulgent to make art, and I don't think that's true. Some people think you should be busy making something that you can sell in the marketplace, and if nobody wants to buy it, it must be crap. And that's not true.
Dana Spiotta
#44. Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline.
Paul Graham
#45. Go ahead, weathercasters and reporters: Tell Americans precisely what we don't want to hear: namely, that our self-indulgent, carbon-heavy, gluttonous and disposable lifestyle is precisely what is churning up the angry response from the skies and seas.
Jane Velez-Mitchell
#46. My father taught me that losing your temper is a self-indulgent act.
Hugh Jackman
#47. Lisa had an engineer's way of shrugging off the entire field of the humanities, all three thousand years of it, as self-indulgent fuzzy thinking.
Austin Grossman
#48. Everyone, whether he is self-denying or self-indulgent, is seeking after the Beloved. Every place may be the shrine of love, whether it be mosque or synagogue.
Hafez
#49. It's an embarrassment of riches because you have directors who don't better. You end up with so much stuff going on the screen that you don't know where to look, and that's what I consider self-indulgent.
John Dykstra
#50. Lipton, a professor of history at SUNY Stony Brook, concluded, "In the face of recent revelations about the reckless and self-indulgent sexual conduct of so many of our elected officials, it may be worth recalling that sexual restraint rather than sexual prowess was once the measure of a man.
Timothy J. Keller
#51. I think therapy is a rather misguided notion of capitalist societies whereby the self-indulgent examination of one's life supersedes the actual living of said life.
Peter Cameron
#52. He was a strange mixture of good and bad, of luxury and industry, courtesy and arrogance. In leisure he was self-indulgent, but full of vigour on service. His outward behaviour was praiseworthy, though ill was spoken of his private life.
Tacitus
#53. I always knew he was selfish and self-indulgent and kind of lazy; those are practically prerequisites for playing lead guitar.
Rainbow Rowell
#54. That's the thing about being an artist, you don't have to take anyone else's perspective into account. You can act as self-indulgent in your emotions as you want.
Jessica Origliasso
#55. Extravagance is considered self-indulgent and unnecessary.
Veronica Roth
#56. The self-indulgent man craves for all pleasant things ... and is led by his appetite to choose these at the cost of everything else.
Aristotle.
#58. A million dollars? A bit much don't you think?"
"Fuck you."
Caleb smiled, the self indulgent little shit. "My apologies," he mocked with a slight forward bow, "What I meant to say is: no pussy's that good. Though yours does come close.
C.J. Roberts
#59. The Baby Boomers: whiny, narcissistic, self-indulgent people with a simple philosophy: "Gimme that! It's mine!"
George Carlin
#60. I'm a songwriter, and I understand artistic licence. We can embellish, go on little journeys and explore our inner selves. It can be quite self-indulgent.
Laura Marling
#61. I think when you can be supremely self-indulgent sometimes it's easy to get up one's own asshole. I need parameters. I need discipline.
Justin Broadrick
#62. The truth is, as much as I loved writing restaurant reviews, it always felt very self-indulgent to me. It was so much fun, I loved doing it, but there's so much else to say about food.
Ruth Reichl
#63. It wasn't that expectations changed. But [teens] went from general expectations of success to having no idea of the right thing to do. In the '60s there was a strong prejudice against careerism. We were self-indulgent and self-destructive.
Michael Medved
#64. We live in an idiotic capitalist self-indulgent society where the sex life of a pop star is more important than impending starvation, land mines and child soldiers in Africa, or more interesting than the world's biggest man-made natural disaster in oil fields of the Middle East.
Peter Menzel
#65. There are not many designers who are truly creative and literate. Most are self-indulgent, illiterate, fashion-mongering, service people trying to bridge a message between a product and an audience.
Ivan Chermayeff
#66. I ended up taking Ben & Jerry and the Gallo brothers home that night, so it was a real orgy, if a very maudlin and self-indulgent one.
Amelia C. Gormley
#67. Say I feel all sad and self-indulgent, then get stung by a wasp, my misery feels quite abstract and I long just to be in spiritual pain once more - 'damn you tiny assassin, clad in yellow and black, how I crave my former innocence where melancholy was my only trial'.
Russell Brand
#68. The notion of loving oneself has gotten an undeservedly bad rap, which goes something like this: self-love is narcissistic, selfish, self-indulgent, the supreme delusion of a runaway ego looking out for "number one." In fact, just the opposite is true.
Sharon Salzberg
#69. When you realize that life isn't fair, you don't act out, you don't get overly wasted, you don't get self-indulgent. You just move forward.
David Hasselhoff
#70. If a musician is making a mediocre, self-indulgent body of work, they have to know that, for the most part, people aren't going to be interested.
Moby
#71. I am a driven writer. I feel guilty if I don't write, not self-indulgent if I do.
Marge Piercy
#72. Be self-indulgent, and those who are also self-indulgent will like you. Tear your neighbor to pieces, and the other neighbors will laugh. But if you beat your soul, all souls will cry out.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#73. Ultimately there is no power to narcissistic, self-indulgent thinking. Authentic thinking originates with an encounter with the world.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#74. I had been sick of carrying around the self-indulgent negativity which was so much the malaise of my generation, my sex and my class.
Robyn Davidson
#75. Market forces which are driven by self indulgent needs designing the ultimate human experiences such as intimacy, love, solidarity and commitment as not enough and no longer needed, resulting in an ongoing emptiness and on the illusion of endless enjoyment.
Bruno De Oliveira
#76. Novel-writing is a settling, lovely space. I call it self-indulgent - I feel mildly guilty about it.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
#77. As artists, it's tempting to forget the audience's needs. Too often, we're self-centered and self-indulgent in what we share with the world. We're prideful, only showing what we deem as perfect or what we think our peers will respect.
Charity Sunshine Tillemann-Dick
#78. I'm for all the actor's struggle, the self-indulgent, painful journey, but I would rather have fun.
Ginnifer Goodwin
#79. Most of the time, as an artist, I can be self-indulgent, fulfilling my own impulses, embracing imagery that contains poetry on my own terms, without immediate regard to an audience or the particular placement of my finished work.
Clifford Ross
#80. If you're in a band or think of yourself as a slightly creative person, you can get quite self-indulgent, so sometimes it's nice to have those people who bring you down to earth, but in a pleasant way.
Jarvis Cocker
#81. I think writing is a part-time career, because otherwise you get a little stale, maybe even self-indulgent, when you have to fill the hours with sentences. I don't think, if I wrote 12 hours a day, my work would be much better.
Cynthia Voigt
#82. Being a vegan is a first-world phenomenon, completely self-indulgent.
Anthony Bourdain
#83. Drugs have nothing to do with the creation of music. In fact, they are dumb and self indulgent. Kind of like sucking your thumb!
Courtney Love
#84. tree. How she feels enslaved of herself, then exposed suddenly, to the plummeting temperature. Weather's self-indulgent caprice chills her body.
Chris Roberts
#85. But our waste problem is not the fault only of producers. It is the fault of an economy that is wasteful from top to bottom-a symbiosis of an unlimited greed at the top and a lazy, passive, and self-indulgent consumptiveness at the bottom-and all of us are involved in it.
Wendell Berry
#86. Autobiographies tell more lies than all but the most self-indulgent fiction .
A.S. Byatt
#87. Worrying can seem self-indulgent, embarrassing and irrational.
Anonymous
#88. I mean, what do you think creativity is? Nothing but self-indulgence. And the more self-indulgent it is, the more interesting it becomes. So I think that part of creativity is also falling in love with your own narcissism: accepting it, using it as an asset.
Nicolas Winding Refn
#89. Audiences don't want to see the kind of self-indulgent, boring dance that is so prevalent today.
Mark Morris
#90. I've written books for awhile, but always on a pretty small scale and always pretty self-indulgent. I chose projects that I thought would be really fun to work on and found friends to work on them with me, and it was all about the process.
Chelsea Cain
#92. I know I'm not a self-indulgent idiot; I also know I'm not the second coming of Deepak Chopra. If I had believed either of those, or both, as some people do when they get famous, that's when the mental illness arrives.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#93. My intentions go one way, my desires another. Thus I feel both self-indulgent and deprived.
Mason Cooley
#94. I would really like to have had the guts and the energy and so on to be able to write about, you know, people having battles with the DHSS. But I ... I haven't. They're dull things. I mean, I'm an arty person. OK, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?
Angela Carter
#95. The show became popular as aspecialthing became popular. And Sasquatch, the guy who runs that site, started coming to every show and reviewing it. And when people start talking about the reviews from the stage. That to me is really self indulgent and we tried to put a caper on that.
Scott Aukerman
#96. The ancestral history from both of my parents carried a raw power. If my initial motivation to look for them tended to self-indulgent curiosity, it quick evolved into a different sense of yearning.
Margaret Louise Harris
#97. Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.
Dave Barry
#98. If you're not allowed to experiment anymore for fear of being considered self-indulgent or pretentious or what have you, then everyone's going to just stick to the rules - there's not going to be any additional ideas.
Francis Ford Coppola
#99. He began to view writing as a petty ambition, a frivolous and indulgent whim, creativity itself as the pathology of the very young or very stupid.
Galt Niederhoffer
#100. Currently she was midway through a bittersweet David Nicholls novel that any other time might well have made her self-indulgently reflective.
Freya North
