Quotes on Oneself

Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement.

Finding oneself was a misnomer; a self is not found but made.

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

All higher humor begins with ceasing to take oneself seriously.

Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.

One receives as reward for much ennui, despondency, boredom -such as a solitude without friends, books, duties, passions must bring with it -those quarter-hours of profoundest contemplation within oneself and nature. He who completely entrenches himself against boredom also entrenches himself against himself: he will never get to drink the strongest refreshing draught from his own innermost fountain.

It is hard to prevent oneself from believing what one so keenly desires.

Let the world know you as you are, not as you think you should be, because sooner or later, if you are posing, you will forget the pose, and then where are you?

One may well find oneself beginning to doubt whether all this could conceivably be the product of an enormous lottery presided over by natural selection, blindly picking the rare winners from among numbers drawn at utter random...nevertheless although the miracle of life stands "explained" it does not strike us as any less miraculous. As Francois Mauriac wrote, What this professor says is far more incredible than what we poor Christians believe.

It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.

The belief that there is only one truth, and that oneself is in possession of it, is the root of all evil in the world.

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

How can one learn to know oneself? Never by introspection, rather by action.

To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.

There is nothing greater than the joy of composing something oneself and then listening to it.

Neither one should hesitate about dedicating oneself to philosophy when young, nor should get tired of doing it when one's old, because no one is ever too young or too old to reach one's soul's healthy.

In the old days people never bothered about what others did, so long as they were free to do what they liked themselves. Today, one cannot sneeze without being corrected, let alone enjoy oneself. That's what politics have done to our society

Nothing is so easy as to deceive oneself; for what we wish, we readily believe.

One can only face in others what one can face in oneself.

Loving the church also means having the courage to make difficult, trying choices, having ever before oneself the good of the church and not one's own.

To affirm is not to bear, carry, or harness oneself to that which exists, but on the contrary to unburden, unharness, and set free that which lives.