self quotes
To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.
The selfcannot be escaped, but it can be, with ingenuity and hard work, distracted. 62
Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, A chorus-ending from Euripides, And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears As old and new at once as Nature's self, To rap and knock and enter in our soul. Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, Round the ancient idol, on his base again, The grand Perhaps.
None are so desolate but something dear, Dearer than self, possesses or possessed A thought, and claims the homage of a tear.
She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.
Whenyou meet someone better thanyourself, turnyour thoughts to becoming his equal.When you meet someone not as good as you are, look within and examine your own self.
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self.
To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.
It isanuneasy lot at best, tobe what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at thisgreat spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self.
One's complete sentences are attempts, as often as not, to complete an incomplete self with words.
All by my own-alone self.
So did I weave my self into the sense.
The self isnow the sacred cow of American culture, self- esteem is sacrosanct, and so we labour to turn arts education into a system in which no one can fail. In the same spirit, tennis could be shorn of its elitist overtones: you just get rid of the net.
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
Ich habe also demnach keine Erkenntnis von mir, wie ich bin, sondern bloÞ, wie ich mir selbst erscheine. Das Bewusstsein seiner selbst ist also noch lange nicht eine Erkenntnis seiner selbst. I have no knowledge of myself as I am but merely as I appear to myself. The consciousness of myself is thus very far from being a knowledge of the self.
The love of our neighbour is the only door out of the dungeon of self, where we mope and mow, striking sparks, and rubbing phosphorescence out of the walls, and blowing our own breath in our own nostrils, instead of issuing to the fair sunlight of God, the sweet winds of the universe.
Is it not possible that the rage for confession, autobiography, especially for memories of earliest childhood, is explained by our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent; which, untouched by all we acquire and all we shed, pushes a green spear through the dead leaves and throughthemould, thrusts a scaled bud through years of darkness until, one day, the light discovers it and shakes the flower free andwe are alivewe are flowering for our moment upon the earth? This is the moment which after all, we live forthe moment of direct feeling when we are most ourselves and least personal.
Virtue could see to do what Virtue would By her own radiant light, though sun and moon Were in the flat sea sunk. And Wisdom's self Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, Where with her best nurse contemplation She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings That in the various bustle of resort Were all too ruffl'd, and sometimes impair'd. He that has light within his own clear breast May sit i'the centre, and enjoy bright day, But he that hides a dark soul, and foul thoughts Benighted walks under the midday sun; Himself is his own dungeon.
Le moi est ha|«s sable. The self is hateful. '
Togrowolder istorealizetheuniverseisCopernican, not Ptolemaic, and that self and the loved one do not form the epicentre of the solar system.
The self persists like a dying star, In sleep, afraid.
Oh heav'nly fool, thy most kiss-worthy face Anger invests with such a lovely grace That Anger's self I needs must kiss again.
Go little book, thy self present, As child whose parent is unkent: To him that is the president Of noblesse and of chivalry, And if that Envy bark at thee, As sure it will, for succour flee.
The function of literature through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and thehigh authorityof theself in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.
Pap warn't in a good humorso he was his natural self.
The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives forever.
In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting.
I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, isgreater to onethanone's self is.
Compassed round by pleasure, sighed For independent happiness; craving peace, The central feeling of all happiness, Not as a refuge from distress or pain, A breathing-time, vacation, or a truce, But for its absolute self.
Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Learn more about self
link/cite print suggestion box