Top 100 Short Self Sayings
#1. In short, self-rule is workable only when a people are self-sufficient enough to reject the hierarchic system as it stands.
Eric Robert Morse
#2. In several short years, Obama has fundamentally shifted the balance away from the individual and toward government, and has altered the national psyche from self-reliance to ever-growing reliance on government.
Monica Crowley
#3. Most of the big banks were shot through with short-termism, deceptive practices and self-dealing. We must institute basic changes in corporate governance and in management practice to restore responsibility and honesty for the sake of the economy and for the self-respect of the country.
Edmund Phelps
#4. In short, I do not believe the cynical liberal claim that the details of conservative political policies are just due to a self-serving ultrarich conspiracy, though the interests and finances of the ultrarich are certainly engaged.
George Lakoff
#5. We want to be clear: The skills we [teach] you for managing your emotions and controlling your urges to self-harm will never be quite as effective or satisfying as self-harm in the short run.
Kim L. Gratz
#6. The Bible is always short on details. Didn't Stephen's innate sense of self-preservation thwart his martyrdom at all?
Hope Jahren
#8. (The short story) is a form that has all the power of the novel - some would say more - but none of the self-importance.
Joseph O'Connor
#9. Parents - and teachers too - are woefully short-sighted when they try to protect the child from his mistakes, when they make the "right answer" more important than the quest for knowledge and good judgment. For what is not learned within one's self cannot be learned from another.
Sydney J. Harris
#10. Because golf exposes the flaws of the human swing - a basically simple maneuver - it causes more self-torture than any game short of Russian roulette.
Grantland Rice
#11. The world has been tragic since the day Adam and Eve sinned in the garden. From that moment murder, mayhem and war entered the scene and we are still suffering the consequences of a man-driven, self-serving, short-sighted environment.
Louie Giglio
#12. Self-pity is not a pleasant emotion and is a fruitless one as well, for its point of no return is an onset of black despair in very short order.
Moss Hart
#13. We thought a magazine, even a self proclaimed literary review, had to be involved in politics. We felt sex was healthy and made (then) bold use of fiction and graphics so declaring. We operated on a shoestring and still got our issues out on time. In short, we had a ball.
Barney Rosset
#14. We judge others according to our image of
perfection as well, and naturally they fall short of our expectations.
Miguel Ruiz
#15. There are so many things in this world. If we put it in short (succinctly), then what will remain? The 'pure Soul' and 'circumstances'. Moreover, to disperse is the nature of circumstances. Therefore, the Pure Soul will not have to tell them to go away.
Dada Bhagwan
#16. The poorer your self-esteem and the lower your self-confidence, the more easily negative feelings can overwhelm ordinary good sense.
Julian Short
#17. I want to feel like I'm making a difference in this world. And I want some time for living rather than just working. Life is for living, isn't it? It can't be all just for working
Zack Love
#18. Revelation is purposive. Its end is not simply divine self-display, but the overcoming of human opposition, alienation and pride, and their replacement by knowledge, love and fear of God. In short: revelation is reconciliation.
John B. Webster
#19. To set aside one's prejudices, one's present needs, and one's own self interest in making a decision as a director for a company is an intellectual exercise that takes constant practice. In short, intellectual honesty is a journey and not a destination.
Mervyn King
#20. Gavin turned to leave, and I was right behind him so I could close the door when he walked out, but he stopped short and turned back around. I bumped straight into him, our faces close, too close, at this point.
"I've missed you," Gavin whispered.
Brynn Myers
#21. The secret to happiness is short-term, stupid self-interest!
Bill Watterson
#22. Claiming to love self, but willingly default to cheating at the first sign of trouble is nothing short of playing yourself. Your ego may feel avenged - temporarily - but your heart and soul, the true self, will suffer the long term affects of karma's justifiable sting.
T.F. Hodge
#23. Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.
Will Self
#24. In short, forbidden fear is merely concerned with self-preservation. It does not take God's glory into account. On the contrary, it actually desires the removal of what it perceives as dangerous, meaning it desires the removal of God.
John Flavel
#25. Self-discipline is often disguised as short-term pain, which often leads to long-term gains. The mistake many of us make is the need and want for short-term gains (immediate gratification), which often leads to long-term pain.
Charles F. Glassman
#26. I like to be comfortable. And I don't like to have to worry about having to adjust things if things are too short; I don't want to feel self conscious, so I like to wear things that make me feel empowered.
Gwendoline Christie
#27. It is a melancholy fact that childhood, so short when compared with the average span of life, should exert such a strong and permanent influence on character that no amount of self-training afterwards can ever completely counter it.
Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan
#28. The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.
Eric Hoffer
#29. I was struggling with drugs, I had a lot on my plate, and you know, I was using unhealthy ways to kind of self-medicate and deal with a lot of heavy duty stuff in my life.
Columbus Short
#30. Every action that you take - that your disorder tells you to take - is self-harming in the short and long term.
Priyavrat Thareja
#31. To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.
Will Self
#32. Can you dissolve your ego? Can you abandon the idea of self and other? Can you relinquish the notions of male and female, short and long, life and death? Can you let go of all these dualities and embrace the Tao without skepticism or panic? If so, you can reach the heart of the Integral Oneness.
Laozi
#33. Developing personal power includes learning not to negotiate your self-worth for the sake of someone else or sell yourself short for a job.
Caroline Myss
#34. In evaluating ourselves, we tend to be long on our weaknesses and short on our strengths.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#35. Self-destructive behaviors do not exist because there is a force within us that tries to hasten our return to an inorganic state; they exist because they provide short-term relief from pain that threatens to become intolerable.
David L. Conroy
#36. But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.
Suzanne Collins
#37. It is safe to say that when people are short on cash, they might be less productive at work, be worse parents, and have less self-control.
Sendhil Mullainathan
#38. Sorrow and strife comes to all persons. Mature people expect hardships and setbacks and patiently and determinedly work to accomplish their goals. Immature people lash out in anger and frustration when circumstances conspire to blunt their short-term objectives.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#39. Nature will eventually do what nature has always done. It will respond in a self-stabilizing manner over the long term with moderate variability over multi-decade periods and with occasional significant variability over the short term.
John H. Sununu
#40. Life's rewards as well as it's short-comings are magnetic reflections of the vivacious energies we release through our thoughts, our actions, and our words.
Netiera Danise
#41. In short, Christmas is God's answer to the slavery of self-salvation. Jesus came to liberate us from the pressure of having to fix ourselves, find ourselves, and free ourselves.
Tullian Tchividjian
#42. What constitutes worth? In short, I would say the valuable attributes you have in relation to how you can productively use them ... All attributes have value, but they have worth if they are used productively.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
#43. Simpler manners, purer lives; more self-denial; more earnest sympathy with the classes that lie below us, nothing short of that can lay the foundations of the Christianity which is to be hereafter, deep and broad.
Frederick William Robertson
#44. He leaned down and whispered to me: No matter how thin you get, no matter how short you cut your hair, it's still going to be you underneath. And he let go of my arm and walked back down the hall.
Marya Hornbacher
#45. So for whatever reason those short lines just felt right to me, in my physical self. They were right for the movement of the poems. Some poems in the book have longer lines.
Matthew Zapruder
#46. I had no contact with my contemporaries in the photographic field, nor even knowledge of their work. So I was influenced by no-one and there were no short cuts for me. I was self-taught the hard way, by trial and error ...
George Rodger
#47. It is a feeble compassion that pulls up short where self-interest begins.
Norm Phelps
#48. We're always too skinny, or too fat. Too tall, or too short. We're shaming each other, and we're shaming ourselves, and it sucks.
Emma Stone
#49. Love yourself. Respect yourself. Never sell yourself short. Believe in yourself regardless of what people think. You can accomplish anything, absolutely anything, if you set your mind to it.
Marcus Allen
#50. New Labour was the most short-sighted, self-serving, incompetent, useless, and ineffective government that Britain has ever known. Make no mistake, Labour's economic policies were a national security liability.
Liam Fox
#51. Selling yourself short shortchanges others who could reap the benefits of what you have to offer; it also shortchanges you who could, in turn, reap the benefits of what others want to offer you.
Pen
#52. On the Brevity of Our Ties
Ties in this world last only for a time. We are husband and wife, parent and child, for a short period only. Once this reality sinks in, we cannot help treasuring each moment of our brief association.
Kentetsu Takamori
#53. History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories - triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally - has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.
Grace Lee Boggs
#54. Oh blind, oh ignorant, self-seeking cupidity whcih spurs as so in the short mortal life and steeps as through all eternity.
Dante Alighieri
#55. Monsieur Lerebour was short, round and jovial, with the joviality of a shopkeeper who liked to do himself well. His wife, who was thin, self-willed and perpetually discontented, had still not succeeded in overcoming her husband's good humour.
Guy De Maupassant
#56. I think that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining things in short words for mouthbreathers who just didn't get it.
Cory Doctorow
#57. How was I able to live alone before, my little everything? Without you I lack self-confidence, passion for work, and enjoyment of life
in short, without you, my life is no life.
[Written to his wife, Mileva]
Albert Einstein
#58. She's the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She's the self-made girl!
( ... )
Well, to begin with, the self-made girl's a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn't self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her.
Henry James
#59. just a short trip to any French territory in the Pacific is enough to convince even the most casual observer that the French are among the most self-serving, manipulative, trivial-minded, obnoxious, cynical, and corrupting nations on the face of the earth.
Paul Theroux
#60. He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a verb in the past tense.
James Joyce
#61. Most of us can only deny short-term pleasures because we see a realistic path between self-denial now and something better down the road.
David Brooks
#62. Not much in the world ends up being the same as it started out,
unless of course it had a very short life cycle.
Lorii Myers
#63. He found his irritation that the American memory could be short.
James Carl Nelson
#64. I no longer have time for unnecessary drama. I wasted so much time scared, self-conscious and insecure. Life is too short to stress the small things anymore.
Daryl Hannah
#65. Think of how much we stress about living up to our "potential," and how it creates anxiety and terror in people; in short, stops them from living their life as fully as they might out of fear and self-loathing.
Emily Susan Rapp
#66. ... worry is an emotional state that I abhor. It tends to be self-absorbed and short-sighted, and holds no purpose other than to waste energy and distract the mind from what actually matters.
Penny Reid
#67. When the world does its level best to devalue me in ways that are nothing short of brutal, all it does is evidence my value. For why would it expend such massive amounts of energy attempting to destroy something that's not there?
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#68. Photoghraphic projects can be as short as an afternoon or as long as a lifetime.
George Barr
#69. 3,2,1 ... Launch! A lot of preparation goes into launching a rocket ship. No short cuts or cheating will get that rocket to its destination. A lot of hard work and dedication goes into every launch. What are you doing to launch? Are you doing the proper work needed? Are you dedicated?
Robert D. Kintigh
#70. Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.
Will Self
#71. Sometimes it just feels so amazing to finally stand up for yourself. I highly recommend it. Life is too short to be taken for granted.
Demi Lovato
#72. You're a little short on self-awareness. People who are always exacting right behaviour from other people tend to be that way.
Joseph Hansen
#73. To see was not to control, that self-understanding was far short of self-mastery. He was afraid of himself.
Richard Wright
#74. Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble - and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#76. I don't believe in fashion. I believe in costume. Life is too short to be same person every day.
Stephanie Perkins
#77. A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.
Will Self
#78. I don't want to eke out my life like a resource in short supply. The only selfish life is a timid one. To hold back, to withdraw, to keep the best in reserve, both overvalues the self, and undervalues what the self is.
Jeanette Winterson
#79. Using someone else's ruler to measure your self-worth will always leave you short.
Charles F. Glassman
#80. I wrote short stories for seven years and used to mail them out. You couldn't send them by e-mail. I called them manila boomerangs. I'd seal the self-addressed stamped envelope inside an envelope and I'd mail it off, and it would come back six weeks later with a rejection letter in it.
Jess Walter
#81. Like most girls I'm always really self-conscious about do I look fat, if my legs are short, if I'm weird shaped, but when I go on stage, man, it never occurs to me. I think I look beautiful.
Janis Joplin
#82. The Right Knowledge reduces pain-and-suffering, and increases happiness. If we fall short of having acquired the Right Knowledge, the faults is ours', isn't it?
Dada Bhagwan
#83. The path is long, but self-surrender makes it short; the way is difficult, but perfect trust makes it easy.
The Mother
#84. Life is short. Time is fleeting. Realize the Self. Purity of the heart is the gateway to God. Aspire. Renounce. Meditate. Be good; do good. Be kind; be compassionate. Inquire, know Thyself.
Sivananda
#85. You can almost define a convict as one who lacks precisely the kind of wisdom and self-control necessary to derive long-term advantage from short-term discomfort.
Stephen Fry
#86. One of the things you need to understand is that I'm not a brave person.
I don't put up with being messed around, and I don't suffer fools gladly.
The short version of that is that I'm a bitch. Trust me, I can produce
character references. But that's something else. I'm not brave.
Robin McKinley
#87. Like the rest of the genetic lottery, beauty is unfair. Everyone falls short of perfection, but some are luckier than others. Real confidence requires self-knowledge, which includes recognizing one's shortcomings as well as one's strengths.
Virginia Postrel
#88. Be you, be true to your word, don't sell yourself short and don't waste your life worrying.
Sam Owen
#89. I acted in a couple friends's short films and thought I was gonna be really good and mysterious and sexy. And I was just terrible and self-aware.
Max Winkler
#90. As long as you pretend to be self-sufficient, you short-circuit God's power in your life. You need to admit your inadequacy and say, "God, I can't handle this!"
Rick Warren
#91. Anything short of the discipline and honesty of a true gold coin standard will inevitably self-destruct, consuming our wealth and liberties, and nurturing the omnipotent state.
Lawrence Reed
#92. Cynical, self-deprecating, affected, indiscriminate, patronizing, immature, as sloppy intellectually as he was with his desk, fickle, vain, virile, brooding, pedantic, philandering...in short, Byronic, Byronic, Byronic, almost to the point of parody.
Laura Elizabeth Woollett
#94. I am my best self when I have super-short hair. That's when I feel most like me and most confident.
Halle Berry
#95. I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean - wherever my imagination ranges.
Anton Chekhov
#96. A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.
David Sedaris
#97. Of course, there are different truths on different levels. Things are true relative to other things; "long" and "short" relate to each other, "high" and "low," and so on. But is there any absolute truth? Something self-sufficient, independently true in itself? I don't think so.
Dalai Lama
#98. A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also a schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man.
Robertson Davies
#99. If nothing else in this long and short life, let me be true to my conscience, to the dignity of my own heart. Let me act in a way that says, I have honored my spirit as truly as I have honored others'. Let me stand tall and rooted as a mountain in the face of a quaking world.
Jennifer DeLucy
#100. A bit self-conscious. "I used to wear mine long as well. It's short now because the monks had to shave the back of my head and it's had but a few months to grow again." He bent forward at the waist, inviting me
Diana Gabaldon
