Quotes to inspire and reflect

Man desires to be free and he desires to feel important. This places him in a dilemma, for the more he emancipates himself from necessity the less important he feels.

Man errs not that he deems / His welfare his true aim, / He errs because he dreams / The world does but exist that welfare to bestow.

A man must first despise himself, and then others will despise him.

Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven’t even got a self to express.

I’m still the same person who grew up mostly in a Midwestern, factory-working neighborhood where talk about “self-esteem” would have seemed like a luxury.

The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.

1 began to understand that self-esteem isn’t everything; it’s just that there’s nothing without it.

Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.

Let a man’s talents or virtues be what thej' may, we only feel satisfaction in his society as he is satisfied in himself.

All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude—and all this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep.

So there was not an “I” anymore—not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect—save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more.

It is easy to live for others; everybody does. I call on you to live for yourselves.

He who undervalues himself is justly undervalued by others.

It is easy—terribly easy—to shake a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work.

Any work looks wonderful to me except the one which I can do.

He that listens after what people say of him shall never have peace.

You must not on any account give me credit for being penetrating. I have impressed people that way before, and the result is always disaster.

The fearful Unbelief is unbelief in yourself.

We can’t reach old age by another man’s road.

Life is what our character makes it. We fashion it, as a snail does its shell. A man can say: “I never made a fortune because it is not in my character to be rich."

You will fetter my leg, but not Zeus himself can get the better of my free will.

In the history of the individual is always an account of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present estate.

If we must accept Fate, we are not less compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the grandeur of duty, the power of character.

Every spirit makes its house; but afterwards the house confines the spirit.

Troubles hurt the most / when they prove self- inflicted.

Why, since we are always complaining of our ills, are we constantly employed in redoubling them?

He invites future injuries who rewards past ones.

A hair shirt does not always render those chaste who wear it.

Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage.

I, who have never willfully pained another, have no business to pain myself.

To refuse the sweets of life because they once must leave us, is as preposterous as to wish to have been born old, because we one day must be old.

We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.

A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self-delusion.

Never can true courage dwell with them, / Who, playing tricks with conscience, dare not look / At their own vices.

All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare.

Self-criticism is an art not many are qualified to practice.

Any one is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.

He who makes great demands upon himself is naturally inclined to make great demands on others.

Man who man would be, / Must rule the empire of himself.

What is this self inside us, this silent observer, / Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us / And urge us on to futile activity, / And in the end, judge us still more severely / For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?

It is a new1 road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself, and apply myself to them, if they will not apply themselves to me.

We learn to curb our will and keep our overt actions within the bounds of humanity, long before we can subdue our sentiments and imaginations to the same mild tone.

fie that would be superior to external influences must first become superior to his own passions.

If one shed tears, they must be shed on one’s pillow.

I am, / indeed, / a king, because I know how to rule myself.

Those people who are uncomfortable in themselves are disagreeable to others.

Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies.