Oneself Quotes

One ought to look a good deal at oneself before thinking of condemning others.

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.

On the one hand, life is made infinitely easy for the personality in that stimulations, interests, uses of time and consciousness are offered to it from all sides. They carry the person as if in a stream, and one needs hardly to swim for oneself.

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.

It is in spending oneself that one becomes rich.

One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love - any love - reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

One must not believe any of those mythologies about oneself as an artist.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

To know oneself is to disbelieve utopia.

Some of us learned in a school of philosophy which taught that all was for the common good and nothing for oneself and have never, in any case, regarded the pursuit of happiness as anything other than an aberration of the human spirit.

To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.

In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.

What becomes fascinating is the way the culture industry doesn't deny it and doesn't try to mitigate it, but tries to sell its products as a way of liberating oneself.

Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.

What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.

The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.

Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.

There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.

One comes to believe whatever one repeats to oneself sufficiently often, whether the statement be true of false. It comes to be dominating thought in one's mind.

The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable.

Not to like ice cream is to show oneself uninterested in food.

The seated lotus postures are an amazing way to go into meditation, or simply just to take a moment to ground oneself.

I don't watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise.

There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.

We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.

A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.

To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.

In a democracy one must have the right to express oneself and that's what I do, even if it displeases.