Self Quotes

“There's always the option of deciding for yourself who you are and what you'll become.”
― Jodi Meadows, Incarnate

“Confidence is like a dragon where, for every head cut off, two more heads grow back.”
― Criss Jami, Venus in Arms

“When you become the image of your own imagination, it's the most powerful thing you could ever do.”
― RuPaul

“It is when you lose sight of yourself, that you lose your way. To keep your truth in sight you must keep yourself in sight and the world to you should be a mirror to reflect to you your image; the world should be a mirror that you reflect upon.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.”
― Roger Zelazny, The Courts of Chaos

“Depression weighs you down like a rock in a river. You don't stand a chance. You can fight and pray and hope you have the strength to swim, but sometimes, you have to let yourself sink. Because you'll never know true happiness until someone or something pulls you back out of that river--and you'll never believe it until you realize it was you, yourself who saved you.”
― Alysha Speer

“unaccountably we are alone
forever alone
and it was meant to be
that way,
it was never meant
to be any other way–
and when the death struggle
begins
the last thing I wish to see
is
a ring of human faces
hovering over me–
better just my old friends,
the walls of my self,
let only them be there.

I have been alone but seldom
lonely.
I have satisfied my thirst
at the well
of my self
and that wine was good,
the best I ever had,
and tonight
sitting
staring into the dark
I now finally understand
the dark and the
light and everything
in between.

peace of mind and heart
arrives
when we accept what
is:
having been
born into this
strange life
we must accept
the wasted gamble of our
days
and take some satisfaction in
the pleasure of
leaving it all
behind.

cry not for me.

grieve not for me.

read
what I’ve written
then
forget it
all.

drink from the well
of your self
and begin
again.

Mind and Heart”
― Charles Bukowski, Come On In!: New Poems

“We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Write it on your heart you are the most beautiful soul of the Universe. Realize it, honor it and celebrate the life.”
― Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power

“Be patient. Your skin took a while to deteriorate. Give it some time to reflect a calmer inner state. As one of my friends states on his Facebook profile: "The true Losers in Life, are not those who Try and Fail, but those who Fail to Try.”
― Jess C. Scott, Clear: A Guide to Treating Acne Naturally

“Stop in somebody's shadow to rest and cool down, and you are lost. No one can make anyone else happy.”
― Peter Deunov

“You don’t have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don’t have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don’t have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don’t have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anyone who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts.
You have to pay your electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that’s all.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

“We all have bad things inside us, and we all choose either to give in to those bad things or to fight them.”
― Kristin Cast, Untamed

“We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.”
― Henri Matisse

“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.”
― Hermann Hesse, Wandering

“I want to be two people at once. One runs away.”
― Peter Heller, The Dog Stars

“Our scars define us. They tell a story of courage and survival. They tell of who we are at our deepest being, of the challenges we've faced and overcome.”
― Lynette Noni, The Gilded Cage

“To be me is to be different...”
― Robert Fanney, Dreams of the Ringed Vale

“Don't hate the media; become the media.”
― Jello Biafra, Become the Media

“In still moments by the sea life seems large-drawn and simple. It is there we can see into ourselves.”
― Rolf Edberg

“Ask anyone and they'll most likely say their family is crazy, and if they don't say their family is crazy, their friends are crazy. That's because everyone is crazy after taking the mask off. People are most themselves when not really trying to fit in, when either alone or around those already closest to them, and that is crazy.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“You are not limited to this body, to this mind, or to this reality—you are a limitless ocean of Consciousness, imbued with infinite potential. You are existence itself.”
― Joseph P. Kauffman, The Answer Is YOU: A Guide to Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Freedom

“It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out.

A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“There is no me. I do not exist. There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed”
― Peter Sellers

“You are what your creators and experiences have made you, like every other being in this universe. Accept that and be done; I tire of your whining.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

“Remember you come here having already understood the necessity of struggling with yourself — only with yourself. Therefore thank everyone who gives you the opportunity.”
― G.I. Gurdjieff

“If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke - but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.”
― Alan W. Watts

“Siddhartha has one single goal-to become empty, to become empty of thirst, desire, dreams, pleasure and sorrow-to let the Self die. No longer to be Self, to experience the peace of an emptied heart, to experience pure thought-that was his goal.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“...you find your genius by looking in the mirror of your life. Your visible image shows your inner truth, so when you're estimating others, what you see is what you get. It therefore becomes critically important to see generously, or you will get only what you see; to see sharply, so that you discern the mix of traits rather than a generalized lump; and to see deeply into dark shadows, or else you will be deceived.”
― James Hillman, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling

“And actually it is not you at all I love, but rather the existence you have bestowed on me”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena