Top 62 Thinking For Oneself Quotes
#1. [A] quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business.
(The Record Lie)
A.A. Milne
#2. The essence of success is that it is never necessary to think of a new idea oneself. It is far better to wait until somebody else does it, and then to copy him in every detail, except his mistakes.
Aubrey Menen
#3. Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meagre.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#4. Humility is not thinking meanly of oneself, but rather it means not thinking of oneself at all.
Vance Havner
#5. I think, myself, that one's memories represent those moments which, insignificant as they may seem, nevertheless represent the inner self and oneself as most really oneself.
Agatha Christie
#6. I think it is a good exercise to ask oneself, "How would I have wanted to be treated?"
Desmond Tutu
#7. If there is such a thing as sin in this world, I think it must be shutting oneself up against hope.
Gail Godwin
#8. I am an artist and a writer, and I do think that one always places oneself in the picture to see where one fits.
Arundhati Roy
#9. Oh yeah? Go fuck yourself.
He hung up.
I called back ten minutes later, thinking it was an appropriate amount of time to have gone and fucked oneself.
Charlie LeDuff
#10. I think closing-off is the most detrimental thing we can do as people. Also, the idea of not judging oneself.
Carrie Brownstein
#11. I think time is a merciless thing. I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you.
Tennessee Williams
#12. I think through living one's life, one both changes and remains the same. One can see it either way, one can see oneself as being now what one was and one can see oneself as being absolutely different from what one was. It's a trick of thought.
Jasper Johns
#13. We must resist in-group thinking and practice seeing every soul as a brother or sister in a larger grouping of humans on earth.
Bryant McGill
#14. The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.
W. H. Auden
#15. Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. More than anything ... it calls for confidence in oneself ... And how can we generate this imponderable quality most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.
Virginia Woolf
#16. Telling others about oneself is ... no simple matter. It depends on what we think they think we ought to be like
Jerome Bruner
#18. The only faults considered grave are the following: not respecting the rights of one's neighbor, letting oneself be paralyzed by fear, feeling guilty, thinking one does not deserve the good and bad which occurs in life, and being a coward.
Paulo Coelho
#19. Before [Hindus and Moslems] dare think of freedom, they must be brave enough to love one another, to tolerate one another's religion, even prejudices and superstitions, and to trust one another. This requires faith in oneself.
Mahatma Gandhi
#20. His life was focused on each single day. For him each night meant a void, a grave, extinction. The capacity to lay oneself down to die at the end of every day, without thinking anything of it, was something he had not yet acquired.
Robert Musil
#21. It's rather nice to think of oneself as a sailor bending over the map of one's mind and deciding where to go and how to go. The great thing to remember is we can do whatever we wish to do provided our wish is strong enough.
Katherine Mansfield
#22. To have the ability to withdraw into oneself and forget everything around one when one is creating - What, I think is the only requirement for being able to bring forth something beautiful. The whole thing is - a mystery.
Edvard Grieg
#23. Immersing oneself in the problems of a book is a good way to keep from thinking of love.
Orhan Pamuk
#24. Look up at the moon; don't think about yourself.
Marty Rubin
#25. We - each of us - are intricately, irremovably connected to the larger universe. It is our true home, and thinking that this physical world is all that matters is like shutting oneself up in a small closet and imagining that there is nothing else out beyond it.
Eben Alexander
#26. The notion of a conscious model of oneself as an individual entity actively trying to establish epistemic relations to the world and to oneself, I think, comes very close to what we traditionally mean by notions like "subjectivity".
Thomas Metzinger
#27. I no longer think that learning how to manage people, especially subordinates, is the most important for executives to learn. I am teaching above all else, how to manage oneself.
Peter Drucker
#28. Probably the most potent desire for a painter, an image-maker, is to see it. To see what the mind can think and imagine, to realize it for oneself, through oneself, as concretely as possible.
Philip Guston
#29. There's no better tonic for other people's bad ideas, than to think for oneself.
Michael R. Burch
#30. Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences - all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn't feel it.
Albert Camus
#31. I do think the author ought to be able to give a good reason for the way things are in his poem. Not a bad question to ask oneself.
James Dickey
#32. It is rather depressing to think that one will still be oneself when one is dead, but I dare say one won't be so critical then.
Angela Thirkell
#33. Assimilating the style of predecessors is necessary before one can develop one's own. Only by immersing oneself in the domain can one find out whether there is room left for contributing creatively to it, and whether one is capable of doing so.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#34. It does not seem possible to think of oneself as normal without thinking that some other kind of person is pathological,
Michael Warner
#35. I have dabbled with action, romance, dance, emotion and comedy. I think I've done well in all.
It's important to keep doing something different and reinvent oneself to avoid stagnation from
creeping in.
Akshay Kumar
#36. I like to think that at best the interview becomes something like the unaccountable experience of talking to oneself in a mirror.
Michael Silverblatt
#37. Mastery of impulse is achieved through taking pauses during life's contrasting situations. Mastery of impulse is about developing strong willpower that can be used to redirect the flow of energy in any situation. Mastery of impulse is about responding to the world with a sense of reason and peace.
Alaric Hutchinson
#38. The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme
thinking too much.
Virginia Woolf
#39. You don't have to be a believer in a lot of superstition and nonsense - there's a difference between thinking to oneself and thinking as a form of conversation, even if there are no answers.
Nadine Gordimer
#40. Of course it is extremely difficult to like oneself in a culture which thinks you are a disease.
Chrystos
#41. It is better to control oneself, if one can, and not hit back. But on certain occasions, it is imperative to defend oneself. I don't think it's fair to ask anybody not to defend herself or himself.
Maya Angelou
#42. It is as commendable to think well of oneself when alone, as it is ridiculous to speak well of oneself among others.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#43. Philosophy means thinking things out for oneself. Ultimately, there can be only one true philosophy, since reason is one and we all live in the same world.
William Ralph Inge
#44. Nate hated, really hated, being told he thought too much. Jason wasn't the only one who said it: hippie-dippie types who romanticize the natural and the "intuitive" also prefer feeling to thought. But not thinking was a way of giving oneself license to be a dick.
Adelle Waldman
#45. As a writer of philosophy, it's good to ask oneself, 'Will I still believe this a week from now, or months, or even years?
Criss Jami
#46. It is easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement.
Ayn Rand
#47. But I was thinking of a way
To feed oneself on batter,
And so go on from day to day
Getting a little fatter.
Lewis Carroll
#48. When one begins to think of oneself as growing old, one is already old.
Elsie De Wolfe
#49. But by that time Lady Harman had acquired the habit of reading and the habit of thinking over what she read, and from that it is an easy step to thinking over oneself and the circumstances of one's own life. The one thing trains for the other.
H.G.Wells
#50. One must never miss an opportunity of quoting things by others which are always more interesting than those one thinks up oneself.
Marcel Proust
#51. One should be an enigma not just to others but to oneself too. I study myself. When I'm tired of that I light a cigar to pass the time, and think: God only knows what the good Lord really meant with me, or what He meant to make of me.
Soren Kierkegaard
#52. A time is one's own, Eva, when oneself and one's peers take the same things for granted, without thinking about it. Likewise, a man is ruined when the times change but he does not. Permit me to add, empires fall for the same reason.
David Mitchell
#53. If you shift your focus from oneself to others, and think more about others' well-being and welfare, it has an immediate liberating effect.
Dalai Lama
#54. Curiosity is a terrible thing, he was thinking. How is it possible to stop oneself from needing to know?
Brian Evenson
#55. Those who truly love and respect you will respect your boundaries. I think freeing oneself from codependency and fear is vital for well-being.
Maria Canals Barrera
#56. I dreamed of myself in a dream, and told the dream, which was mine, as if it were another person's of whom I dreamed. Indeed what is life when thinking of the past, but dreaming of a dream dreamt by another who seems to be oneself?
Stopford Brooke
#57. When making public policy decisions about new technologies for the Government, I think one should ask oneself which technologies would best strengthen the hand of a police state. Then, do not allow the Government to deploy those technologies.
Phil Zimmermann
#58. Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
Aldous Huxley
#60. That is the whole trouble with being a heretic. One usually must think out everything for oneself.
Aubrey Menen
#61. To think of abstraction as an end in itself is undoubtedly letting oneself be led into a cul-de-sac and can only lead to exhaustion and impotence.
Jacob Epstein
#62. Unhappiness, I saw then, comes to each of us because we think ourselves at the center of the world, because we have the miserable conviction the we alone suffer to the point of unbearable intensity. Unhappiness is always to feel oneself imprisoned in one's own skin, in one's own brain.
Jacques Lusseyran
