Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self-delusion.
7
Never can true courage dwell with them, / Who, playing tricks with conscience, dare not look / At their own vices.
8
Self-criticism is an art not many are qualified to practice.
10
All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare.
4
Any one is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.
7
He who makes great demands upon himself is naturally inclined to make great demands on others.
8
What is this self inside us, this silent observer, / Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us / And urge us on to futile activity, / And in the end, judge us still more severely / For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?
6
Man who man would be, / Must rule the empire of himself.
11
Not being able to govern events, I govern myself, and apply myself to them, if they will not apply themselves to me.
7
It is a new1 road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.
4
fie that would be superior to external influences must first become superior to his own passions.
4
We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone.
9
If one shed tears, they must be shed on one’s pillow.
7
I am, / indeed, / a king, because I know how to rule myself.
8
Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.
8
Those people who are uncomfortable in themselves are disagreeable to others.
9
Perhaps well-to-do women and unemployed ghetto teenagers have something in common. Neither group has been allowed to develop the self-confidence that comes from knowing you can support yourselves.
6
There’s one blessing only, the source and cornerstone of beatitude—confidence in self.
7
It generally happens that assurance keeps an even pace with ability.
4
Assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
5
Take the place and attitude to which you see your unquestionable right, and all men acquiesce.
4
Self-trust is the essence of heroism.
4
The perfection preached in the Gospels never yet built an empire. Every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness, and cunning.
5
[H]aving tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, 1 must come out, I must emerge.
7
Every man is correct in asking God why he is stuck with himself, and his rotten luck.
7
The whole dear notion of one’s own Self—marvelous old free-willed, free- enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self— is a myth.
8
Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.
8
You live and die according to what goes on in yourself, which no one else can even begin to know, not even father, mother, wife, son, or daughter.
6
No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.
9
Each one is all in all to himself; for being dead, all is dead to him.
8
What other dungeon i^ so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!
11
It was strange to have no self—to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do.
8
The spirit is the true self, not that physical figure which can be pointed out by your finger.
8
So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man’s genius contracts itself to a very few hours.
4
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
9
The ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself.
7
My care is for myself; / Myself am whole and sole reality.
8
When the self is one’s exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words.
9
A man can deceive a woman by his sham attachment to her provided he does not have a real attachment elsewhere.
7
Once a woman parts with her virtue, she loses the esteem even of the man whose vows and tears won her to abandon it.
6
To keep oneself safe does not mean to bury oneself.
7
Brisk Confidence still best with woman copes: / Pique her and soothe in turn—soon Passion crowns thy hopes.
9
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
7
Happy he whoe’er, content with the common lot, with safe breeze hugs the shore, and, fearing to trust his skiff to the wider sea, with unambitious oar keeps close to the land.
6
Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.
7
God Himself is not secure, having given man dominion over His works.
10
Monopoly or the full control of supply, and hence of price, by a single firm was the ultimate security. But there were many very habitable half-way houses.
7
The most beaten paths are certainly the surest; but do not hope to scare up much game on them.
7