Self Quotes

“There's something liberating about not pretending. Dare to embarrass yourself. Risk.”
― Drew Barrymore

“When I lay my head on the pillow at night I can say I was a decent person today. That's when I feel beautiful.”
― Drew Barrymore

“If I was made of cake I'd eat myself before somebody else could.”
― Emma Donoghue, Room

“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“One must find the source within one's own Self, one must possess it. Everything else was seeking -- a detour, an error.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

“[T]hou canst not think worse of me than I do of myself.”
― Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

“The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.”
― Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

“Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.”
― Alan Wilson Watts

“You're a poem?' I repeated.

She chewed her lower lip. 'If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose whose world was swallowed by the sea.'

'Isn't it hard to be three things at the same time?'

'What's your name?'

'Enn.'

'So you are Enn,' she said. 'And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“Like vanishing dew,
a passing apparition
or the sudden flash
of lightning -- already gone --
thus should one regard one's self.”
― Ikkyu

“Man is originally characterized by his "search for meaning" rather than his "search for himself." The more he forgets himself—giving himself to a cause or another person—the more human he is. And the more he is immersed and absorbed in something or someone other than himself the more he really becomes himself.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning

“I've tried

to become someone else for a while,
only to discover that he, too, was me.”
― Stephen Dunn

“When you're rotten about yourself, you become rotten to everyone else, even those
you love.”
― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

“Your duty is to be and not to be this or that. 'I am that I am' sums up the whole truth. The method is summed up in the words 'Be still'. What does stillness mean? It means destroy yourself. Because any form or shape is the cause for trouble. Give up the notion that 'I am so and so'. All that is required to realize the Self is to be still. What can be easier than that?”
― Ramana Maharshi

“I like to reinvent myself — it’s part of my job.”
― Karl Lagerfeld

“I've decided that I'm not going to try to squeeze myself into a friendship that hurts me anymore. I'm going to let her go and just be friends with people who make me feel good about myself.”
― Zoe Sugg

“Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it toward others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.”
― Etty Hillesum

“Why talk about what we want? That is childish. Absurd. Of course, you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it. But no one else is. The rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

“Your dreaming self seeks to tell you something your waking ears will not hear”
― Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Chosen

“I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Some people think they can find satisfaction in good food, fine clothes, lively music, and sexual pleasure. However, when they have all these things, they are not satisfied. They realize happiness is not simply having their material needs met. Thus, society has set up a system of rewards that go beyond material goods. These include titles, social recognition, status, and political power, all wrapped up in a package called self-fulfillment. Attracted by these prizes and goaded on by social pressure, people spend their short lives tiring body and mind to chase after these goals. Perhaps this gives them the feeling that they have achieved something in their lives, but in reality they have sacrificed a lot in life. They can no longer see, hear, act, feel, or think from their hearts. Everything they do is dictated by whether it can get them social gains. In the end, they've spent their lives following other people's demands and never lived a life of their own. How different is this from the life of a slave or a prisoner?”
― Liezi, Lieh-tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living

“Your expectation of something unique and dramatic, of some wonderful explosion, is merely hindering and delaying your Self Realization. You are not to expect an explosion, for the explosion has already happened - at the moment when you were born, when you realized yourself as Being-Knowing-Feeling. There is only one mistake you are making: you take the inner for the outer and the outer for the inner. What is in you, you take to be outside you and what is outside, you take to be in you. The mind and feelings are external, but you take them to be intimate. You believe the world to be objective, while it is entirely a projection of your psyche. That is the basic confusion and no new explosion will set it right! You have to think yourself out of it. There is no other way.”
― Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“The woman I was yesterday, introduced me to the woman I am today; which makes me very excited about meeting the woman I will become tomorrow. ”
― Poetic Evolution

“There are times when I am so unlike myself that I might be taken for someone else of an entirely opposite character.”
― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

“I myself am an absolute abyss.”
― Antonin Artaud

“Don’t be surprised by your greatness. Be surprised that no one expected it.”
― Rebecca Maizel, Infinite Days

“I’ve always been a slow learner in some areas of my life.mostly the areas known as myself. Or maybe I should say ‘selves.’because the fact is, I’ve never, even as a child, felt I’m only one self, only one person. I’ve always felt I’m quite a few more than one. For example, there’s my jokey self, there’s my morose and fed-up self,there’s my lewd and disgusting self. There’s my clever-clogs self, and my fading-violet-who-cant-make-up-her-mind-about-anything self. There’s my untidy-clothes-everywhere-all-over-my-room self, and my manically tidy self when I want my room to be minimalist and Zen to the nth degree. There’s my confidant, arrogant self and my polite and reasonable and good listener self. There’s my self-righteous self and my wickedly bad self, my flaky self and my bsentimental self. There are selfs I like and selfs I don’t like.there’s my little-girl selfnwhonlikes to play silly games and there’s my old-woman self when I’m quite sure I’m eighty and edging towards geriatric.
The self I show in action at any moment depends on where I am, who I’m with, the circumstances of the situation and the mood I’m in.”
― Aidan Chambers, This Is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn

“I value my own
independence so highly that I can fancy no degradation greater than that
of having another man perpetually directing and advising and lecturing
me, or even planning too closely in any way about my actions. He might
be the wisest of men, or the most powerful--I should equally rebel and
resent his interference...”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South