Top 100 Self Indulgent Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Currently she was midway through a bittersweet David Nicholls novel that any other time might well have made her self-indulgently reflective.
Freya North
#5. The word indulgent has become a popular catchphrase for dishes we should not eat for health's sake. I never use it to describe food, only poor parenting.
Martha Hall Foose
#6. 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
#8. Because the Lord loves us He chastens and rebukes us. Modern sentimentality has reduced God to a tolerant indulgent grandfatherly being who winks at our transgressions.
Vance Havner
#9. Be indulgent toward those who ... are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#10. 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
#11. You can watch someone on-stage cry and cry - but in the audience you feel nothing. It's easy to become indulgent. For me, what's important is the story first.
Laura Linney
#12. To the Public, for the indulgent ear it has inclined to a plain tale with few pretensions.
Charlotte Bronte
#13. "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
#14. I have never compromised on academics and the one thing that I insist on is good grades, even though I am a relaxed and indulgent parent in most other things.
Preeti Shenoy
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. My secret indulgent food is dessert. I have an incredible sweet tooth - chocolate pudding with vanilla ice-cream or trifle and pavlova. I do love dessert.
Deborra-Lee Furness
#19. I'm becoming more indulgent and less giving as an actor as I get older. I'm immersing myself more in roles emotionally.
Rhys Ifans
#20. There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out
what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.
Aleksandar Hemon
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. For I was not, as I liked to think, the indulgent pleasure-loving opposite of the cold rigid Colonel. I was the lie that Empire tells itself when times are easy, he the truth that Empire tells when harsh winds blow.
J.M. Coetzee
#24. The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness, when in fact I am amiable, indulgent, affectionate, shy and rather timid at heart.
J.B. Priestley
#25. 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
#26. Modern science, then, so far from being an enemy of romance, is seen on every hand to be its sympathetic and resourceful friend, its swift and irresistible helper in its serious need, and an indulgent minister to its lighter fancies.
Richard Le Gallienne
#27. The problem of power is how to achieve its responsible use rather than its irresponsible and indulgent use; of how to get men of power to live for the public rather than off the public.
John F. Kennedy
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. And I look forward to the time when I can become more indulgent with my songwriting. But this band is a family, and it's a process that we have to grow with together.
Stone Gossard
#32. Why should self-indulgent nonsense - whatever its professed political orientation - be lauded as the height of scholarly achievement?
Alan Sokal
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. We hold that gain after toil, triumph after adversity, achievement to a goal long-sought, is a greater beneficence than prebendary nutrient from the teat of an indulgent government.
Jack Vance
#37. Happy the man whom indulgent fortune allows to pay to virtue what he owes to nature, and to make a generous gift of what must otherwise be ravished from him by cruel necessity.
David Hume
#38. 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
#39. Now, I looked across the Plattsburgh train depot and swelled with indulgent love at Ev's grumpy scowl.
Miranda Beverly-Whittemore
#40. Beware of any belief that makes you self-indulgent; it came from the pit, no matter how beautiful it sounds.
Oswald Chambers
#41. For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.
Diablo Cody
#42. I've been very self-indulgent and weird and I'm sorry. But I'd really like to die.
Frederick Busch
#43. 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
#44. She was difficult, she knew. She did not make friends. She was brisk and demanding, unsparing and indulgent.
Gordon Dahlquist
#45. In ambition, as in love, the successful can afford to be indulgent toward their rivals. The prize our own, it is graceful to recognize the merit that vainly aspired to it.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#46. I was just ready to make a movie for the girls. It was just really fun to write for a girl. It was really indulgent and sweet. The whole movie feels indulgent, doesn't it? It's such a romp in England.
Jerusha Hess
#47. You do not know the unfathomable cowardice of humanity ... servile in the face of force, pitiless in the face of weakness, implacable before blunders, indulgent before crimes ... and patient to the point of martyrdom before all the violences of bold despotism.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#48. 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
#49. When you could be sloppy, you're not. When you could be indulgent, you're not. When you could be sad, you laugh instead. If you fall down, you pick yourself up again and again and again.
Frederick Lenz
#50. 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
#51. I've never heard my dad say a bad word about anybody. He always keeps his emotions in check and is a true gentleman. I was taught that losing it was indulgent, a selfish act.
Hugh Jackman
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. He gave her an indulgent look. "I'll forgive these rash words for now." She sputtered, "Forgive? Let's talk about who should be forgiving who."
"Whom," he corrected.
"Shut up! I'm in the right here. Remember all those things you did to me?
Kresley Cole
#55. In orthodox film-making, you never shoot sequentially - but with improv, obviously every move you make has a knock-on effect; it is a cumulative process. I have improvised, on the non-scripted 'Timecode.' It can become entirely indulgent: actors smashing crockery and competing verbally.
Saffron Burrows
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.
Audre Lorde
#59. I make time to exercise. It's not being indulgent. I think it's got a lot to do with your ability to manage properly and stay focused. There's no doubt about that.
Ginni Rometty
#60. 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
#61. The Italians are not indulgent, as Americans are. They don't have the patience to teach young singers how to move. They think you should learn in school.
Marcello Giordani
#62. 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
#63. I love America for its bourgeois comfort. If I was as heavily in debt as they are, I wouldn't be drinking tea or coffee anywhere. I would be sipping tap water from an old bottle and serving others tea or coffee in a cafe somewhere.
Vann Chow
#64. Societies don't become less self-indulgent; people do.
Mal Fletcher
#65. It's disappointing to feel sad for no reason. Sadness can be almost pleasantly indulgent when you have a way to justify it.
Allie Brosh
#66. 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
#67. Having a child makes you strong and gives you chutzpah. It relaxed my attitude to the job; my center of focus shifted, which I think is very helpful, because even if you're not a very indulgent actor you spend a lot of time thinking about yourself. I don't think that is particularly healthy.
Imelda Staunton
#68. Most women are indulgent of themselves. This is a mistake. It should be only the reward of old age.
Anna Held
#69. Gogol is unaccustomed to this sort of talk at mealtimes, to the indulgent ritual of the lingering meal, and the pleasant aftermath of bottles and crumbs and empty glasses that clutter the table.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#70. But one aspect of Revelation must not be allowed to exclude or to obscure another; and Christianity is dogmatical, devotional, practical all at once; it is esoteric and exoteric; it is indulgent and strict; it is light and dark; it is love, and it is fear.
John Henry Newman
#71. 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
#72. People apparently only read mystery stories of any length. With mysteries, the longer the better, and people will read any damn thing. But the indulgent, 800-page books that were written a hundred years ago are just not going to be written anymore, and people need to get used to that.
Cormac McCarthy
#73. I revere the memory of Mr. F. as an estimable man and most indulgent husband, only necessary to mention Asparagus and it appeared or to hint at any little delicate thing to drink and it came like magic in a pint bottle; it was not ecstasy but it was comfort.
Charles Dickens
#74. 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
#76. poet convinced both of his own talent and of the need to be self-indulgent in order to be a great artist.
Walter Isaacson
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. The love of Americans for their country is not an indulgent, it is an exacting and chastising love; they cannot tolerate its defects.
Jacques Maritain
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. It is only necessary to grow old to become more charitable and even indulgent. I see no fault committed by others that I have not committed myself.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#83. 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
#84. Enjoyment while performing was rare - enjoyment would have been an indulgent loss of focus that comedy cannot afford. After the shows, however, I experienced long hours of elation or misery depending on how the show went, because doing comedy alone onstage is the ego's last stand.
Steve Martin
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. My father taught me that losing your temper is a self-indulgent act.
Hugh Jackman
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. We always believe God is like ourselves, the indulgent think him indulgent and the stern, terrible.
Joseph Joubert
#95. I always knew he was selfish and self-indulgent and kind of lazy; those are practically prerequisites for playing lead guitar.
Rainbow Rowell
#96. Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones.
Honore De Balzac
#97. 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
#98. Extravagance is considered self-indulgent and unnecessary.
Veronica Roth
#99. A society devoted to self-destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.
Dan Simmons
#100. Death, it seems," Garp wrote, "does not like to wait until we are prepared for it. Death is indulgent and enjoys, when it can, a flair for the dramatic.
John Irving
