Quotes on Oneself

One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were . . . . It happened bit by bit, until . . . you're doing exactly what you don't want to do with people you can't stand -- the people you hated when you were ten.

Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.

At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about 'petty personal problems' was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions—and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas—can't be yours alone. [...] Growing up is after all only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what everyone shares.

True freedom means freeing oneself from the dictates of the ego and its accompanying emotions.

In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.

In Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are same. So if you’re not hearing mindfulness in some deep way as heartfulness, you’re not really understanding it. Compassion and kindness towards oneself are intrinsically woven into it. You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.

I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.

to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing

Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.

Psychology is action, not thinking about oneself. We continue to shape our personality all our life. To know oneself, one should assert oneself.

How hard it is to have the beautiful interdependence of marriage and yet be strong in oneself alone.

One can't fight with oneself, for this battle has only one loser.

The challenge these days, is to be somewhere, to belong to some particular place, invest oneself in it, draw strength and courage from it, to dwell in a community.

It is as commendable to think well of oneself when alone, as it is ridiculous to speak well of oneself among others.

the more i live, the more i realize what strange creatures human beings are. some of them might just as well have a hundred legs, like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. the human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-man seem actually non-existent. one doubts if they exist to any startling degree even in oneself.

I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?

Though thousand times a thousand in battle one may conquer, yet should one conquer just oneself, one is the greatest conqueror.

Simplicity is not a goal, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, as one approaches the real meaning of things.

Happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy - it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.

Solidarity is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all

I was on the whole considerably discouraged by my school days... It is not pleasant to feel oneself so completely outclassed and left behind at the very beginning of the race.