Self Quotes

“If you want to find the real competition, just look in the mirror. After awhile you'll see your rivals scrambling for second place.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Some are young people who don't know who they are, what they can be or even want to be. They are afraid, but they don't know of what. They are angry, but they don't know at whom. They are rejected and they don't know why. All they want is to be somebody. ”
― Thomas S. Monson, Pathways to perfection;: Discourses of Thomas S. Monson

“My mother always told me
No monster lived beneath my bed,
But she had failed to warn me
It laid on top of it instead.”
― Erin Hanson

“We always see the worst in our selves. Our most volnerable selves. We need someone to get close enough to tell us that we're wrong. Someone we trust.”
― Rachel Cohn, Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List

“We reveal most about ourselves when we speak about others.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“The square root of I is I.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

“The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.”
― Alain de Botton

“Who you are is always right.”
― Deng Ming-Dao, Everyday Tao: Living with Balance and Harmony

“I have to admit it humbly, mon cher compatriote, I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be heard in everything I said. I could never talk without boasting, especially if I did so with that shattering discretion that was my specialty. It is quite true that I always lived free and powerful. I simply felt released in the regard to all the for the excellent reason that I recognized no equals. I always considered myself more intelligent than everyone else, as I’ve told you, but also more sensitive and more skillful, a crack shot, an incomparable driver, a better lover. Even in the fields in which it was easy for me to verify my inferiority–like tennis, for instance, in which I was but a passable partner–it was hard for me not to think that, with a little time and practice, I would surpass the best players. I admitted only superiorities in me and this explained my good will and serenity. When I was concerned with others, I was so out of pure condescension, in utter freedom, and all the credit went to me: my self-esteem would go up a degree.”
― Albert Camus, The Fall

“He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

“A man can stand a lot as long as he can stand himself. He can live without hope, without friends, without books, even without music, as long as he can listen to his own thoughts.”
― Axel Munthe

“You are an ocean in a drop of dew,
all the universes in a thin sack of blood.

What are these pleasures then,
these joys, these worlds
that you keep reaching for,
hoping they will make you more alive?”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“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, Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth”
― Oscar Wilde

“There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else's life. But this notion gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me.”
― Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism

“I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems

“What gets scary is when your self-worth is tied up in what strangers think of you.”
― Emma Watson

“You're afraid. Of yourself more than anyone else in the world.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Kingdom of Ash

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be…”
― joan didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“Reading gives one something to think about other than one's self.”
― Tom Bissell

“What else should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become.”
― David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

“...you have to ask yourself two questions: Who am I? And how may I become myself?”
― Paul Beatty, The Sellout

“You can only get outside yourself by looking inside.”
― Tonya Hurley, Homecoming

“Old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it's not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him or herself in us, 'Who's that looking at me so sadly,' he or she would say.”
― José Saramago, All the Names

“My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I myself, and through it am I my property.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

“I want to unfold.
I don’t want to be folded anywhere,
because where I am folded,
there I am a lie.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that's not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream. And daydreams return me to my original sense of things and I luxuriate in these fervid primary visions until I am entirely my unalloyed self again. So even though it sometimes feels as if one could just about die from disappointment I must concede that in fact in a rather perverse way it is precisely those things I did not get that are keeping me alive.”
― Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond

“There’s just something unsettling about studying your reflection. It’s not a matter of being dissatisfied with your face or of being embarrassed by your vanity. Maybe it’s that when you gaze into your own eyes, you don’t see what you wish to see—or glimpse something that you wish weren’t there.”
― Dean Koontz, Deeply Odd

“O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all - what is it?”
― Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

“I am... me. No matter what I say or do, I'm still me. That 's what Satozuki told me once. The things I feel, the things I do... Being a vampire, Being a man, being betrayed by my mother... when all those things come together, they make up "me." But none of these things taken separately. I'm just me.”
― Ohmi Tomu, Midnight Secretary, Vol. 05