Oneself Quotes

To forget oneself is to be happy.

Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.

An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.

I say it is indispensable to look ahead of and behind oneself in the present. If there is such a thing as tradition, and I believe there is, it can only exist in the sense of the most profound movements of culture.

To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.

Money can add very much to one's ability to lead a constructive life, not only pleasant for oneself, but, hopefully, beneficial to others.

Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.

Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke - and that the joke is oneself.

If one is reported as having set up camp overseas, it's as if one has made oneself unavailable.

To think the world therefore a general Bedlam, or place of madmen, and oneself a physician, is the most necessary point of present wisdom: an important imagination, and the way to happiness.

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division; and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts.

One never comes into embarrassment, if one is ready to balance. To ask oneself never in embarrassment, what have you in these decades made.

The Southern whites are in many respects a great people. Looked at from a certain point of view, they are picturesque. If one will put oneself in a romantic frame of mind, one can admire their notions of chivalry and bravery and justice.

In France one must adapt oneself to the fragrance of a urinal.

It is after all the greatest art to limit and isolate oneself.

I think it's important for one to take a certain distance from oneself.

The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.

What a powerful thing to know: That one's own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other.

The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat oneself.

Coming out is a means of redefining oneself, of claiming membership in a lifestyle and a social order with distinct values. Chief among these values is honesty.

A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke - and that the joke is oneself.

To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

One has the responsibility to oneself, to the writer, director and the people who put up the money, to put out the best of what one has experienced and understood about the human condition as it relates to the role one has been hired to portray.

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.