Self Quotes - page 7

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self. (Alfred North Whitehead)
Compassion is the desire that moves the individual self to widen the scope of its self-concern to embrace the whole of the universal self. View quote
Arnold J. Toynbee
All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unwilling or unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self.... What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself - a troupe of players that I have internalised, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required.... I am a theater and nothing more than a theater. View quote
Philip Roth
The concert is a polite form of self induced torture. View quote
Henry Miller
I guess the very first thing is to own your true self, and that includes achieving the point of not lying to others; the first step should be not lying to yourself. View quote
Ayumi Hamasaki
When a soul has advanced so far on the spiritual road as to be lost to all the natural methods of communing with God; when it seeks Him no longer by meditation, images, impressions, nor by any other created ways, or representations of sense, but only by rising above them all, in the joyful communion with Him by faith and love, then it may be said to have found God of a truth, because it has truly lost itself as to all that is not God, and also as to its own self. View quote
John of the Cross
SELF-EVIDENT, adj. Evident to one's self and to nobody else. View quote
Ambrose Bierce
A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world. View quote
George Bernard Shaw
Spirituality is much wider than any particular religion, and in the larger ideas of it that are now coming on us even the greatest religion becomes no more than a broad sect or branch of the one universal religion, by which we shall understand in the future man's seeking for the eternal, the divine, the greater self, the source of unity and his attempt to arrive at some equation, some increasing approximation of the values of human life with the eternal and the divine values. View quote
Sri Aurobindo
The terrifying experience and obsession of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of yourself. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness. View quote
Emil Cioran
Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations? (Emil Cioran)
Ambition, like a torrent, ne'er looks back; And is a swelling, and the last affection A high mind can put off; being both a rebel Unto the soul and reason, and enforceth All laws, all conscience, treads upon religion, and offereth violence to nature's self. View quote
Ben Jonson
[Somali maritime violence] is a response to greedy Western nations, who invade and exploit Somalia's water resources illegally. It is not a piracy, it is self defence. It is defending the Somalia children's food. View quote
Muammar Gaddafi
It's odd to look out there and see a bunch of Mini-Mes,” says Williams. "You're wondering what possessed them to do such a thing... It sort of does a reverse psychology on you. You'd think you'd be like `Hey, all these people want to look like me. I feel pretty cool.' But actually it makes you feel more self aware and I'm not really fond of that. View quote
Hayley Williams
True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one's self, and in the next, from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions. View quote
Joseph Addison
Daily life is a comprimised blend of posturing for the sake of role-playing and of varying degrees of self-revelation. Under stressful conditions even the "true" self cannot be precisely defined, as Erving Goffman observes. ...Little wonder that the identity crisis is a major source of modern neuroticism, and that the urban middle class aches for a return to a simpler existence. View quote
E. O. Wilson
I'll tell you, I think that the Internet has provided an enormous boost to film criticism by giving people an opportunity to self publish or to find sites that are friendly. View quote
Roger Ebert
Lichtenberg ... held something of the following kind: one should neither affirm the existence of God nor deny it. ... It is not that he wished to leave certain perspectives open, nor to please everyone. It is rather that he was identifying himself, for his part, with a consciousness of self, of the world, and of others that was "strange” (the word is his) in a sense which is equally well destroyed by the rival explanations. View quote
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home. View quote
Thom Gunn
Sad times May follow your tracks, Bad times May bar you from Saks, Add times When Satan in slacks Breaks down your self control. View quote
Cole Porter
To abjure the notion of the "truly human” is to abjure the attempt to divinize the self as a replacement for a divinized world. (Richard Rorty)
The little I knew about my own self wouldn't have filled a thimble! View quote
Alice Walker
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self. View quote
Iris Murdoch
Worlds self made are so full of monsters and demons. View quote
Anaïs Nin
Silence is not the absence of sound, but the absence of self. View quote
Anthony de Mello