Quotes to inspire and reflect

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

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

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

He invites future injuries who rewards past ones.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Perhaps well-to-do women and unemployed ghetto teenagers have something in common. Neither group has been allowed to develop the self-confidence that comes from knowing you can support yourselves.

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

Assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.

There’s one blessing only, the source and cornerstone of beatitude—confidence in self.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism.

It generally happens that assurance keeps an even pace with ability.

Take the place and attitude to which you see your unquestionable right, and all men acquiesce.

[H]aving tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, 1 must come out, I must emerge.

The perfection preached in the Gospels never yet built an empire. Every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness, and cunning.

The whole dear notion of one’s own Self—marvelous old free-willed, free- enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self— is a myth.

You live and die according to what goes on in yourself, which no one else can even begin to know, not even father, mother, wife, son, or daughter.

Every man is correct in asking God why he is stuck with himself, and his rotten luck.

Each one is all in all to himself; for being dead, all is dead to him.

Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.

What other dungeon i^ so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!

So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man’s genius contracts itself to a very few hours.

It was strange to have no self—to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do.

The spirit is the true self, not that physical figure which can be pointed out by your finger.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

The ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself.

My care is for myself; / Myself am whole and sole reality.

When the self is one’s exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words.

A man can deceive a woman by his sham attachment to her provided he does not have a real attachment elsewhere.

Once a woman parts with her virtue, she loses the esteem even of the man whose vows and tears won her to abandon it.

Brisk Confidence still best with woman copes: / Pique her and soothe in turn—soon Passion crowns thy hopes.