Top 272 Oneself Quotes

To Live signifies to believe and hope – to lie and to lie to oneself.

To speak of oneself means to lay bare one’s own soul, expose it like a body to the sun. To lay bare one’s own soul is not at all like taking off one’s brassiere on a crowded beach!

The whole problem of the sound-work is distancing oneself from the dramatic.

Chinese learning is an internal learning, but Western learning is an external one; Chinese learning is for the cultivation of oneself, just as Western learning is for the handling of worldly affairs.

Certainly, cooking for oneself reveals man at his weirdest.

To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

The poet is primarily a spokesman, making statements or incantations on behalf of himself or others – usually for both, for it is difficult to speak for oneself without speaking for others or to speak for others without speaking for oneself.

Jihad is holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community.

Ever since school, I got a lot of attention as I was modelling and everyone knew who I was. As a child, you enjoy it. But one has to explore and doing things by oneself to learn that life is very large.

I have never had a studio, and I do not understand shutting oneself up in a room. To draw, yes; to paint, no.

The older one gets the more one comes to resemble oneself.

To congratulate oneself on one’s warm commitment to the environment, or to peace, or to the oppressed, and think no more is a profound moral fault.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

I’ve tried it all. I’d love to do radio plays. I think that one should be open to everything and shouldn’t limit oneself.

Muscles are fleeting. Bodies give out. But integrity, honor? The confidence to be oneself, to follow one’s heart? The compassionate drive to help others, even at great risk? That’s strength.

We have observed that, in society and the world in which we live, selfishness has increased more than love for others, and that men of good will must work, each with his own strengths and expertise, to ensure that love for others increases until it is equal and possibly exceeds love for oneself.

One creates oneself.

How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity.

To know oneself is to disbelieve utopia.

True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.

There’s a panic, a rush, to this ‘achievement’ of fame. There’s also the ambivalence of fame: the love of it and the hatred of it. We sometimes hate the famous while, at the same time, straining to achieve fame oneself.

In many ways, writing is the act of saying ‘I,’ of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying, ‘Listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.’ It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act.

Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.

The hardest thing is to tell the truth about oneself. One doesn’t like to remember unpleasant details, but forgetting them makes one’s life seem disorganized.

In order to engage in an ‘experiencing of the world,’ one has to physically move oneself to the most diverse places on earth.

As we know, forgiveness of oneself is the hardest of all the forgivenesses.

Personally, I like reading adventures which really have happened to people, because they show what kind of things might happen to oneself, and they teach one how to ‘Be Prepared’ to meet them.

One ought to look a good deal at oneself before thinking of condemning others.

On the one hand, life is made infinitely easy for the personality in that stimulations, interests, uses of time and consciousness are offered to it from all sides. They carry the person as if in a stream, and one needs hardly to swim for oneself.

There’s nothing harder than defining oneself.

What comes from oneself, is nearly from no one. There is only me as a link.

I don’t watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

I believe that misconceptions about oneself that one does not correct where possible act as a bad magic.

Comparing oneself with one’s fellow writers is a bad idea. I would not review a fellow writer unless I had something terribly positive to say.

They prospect of seeing oneself in the mirror clean-shaven is too close to a Vincent Price film… a prospect not to be contemplated, no matter the compensation.

Salvation lies in imitating Christ, in other words, in imitating the ‘withdrawal relationship’ that links him with his Father… To listen to the Father’s silence is to abandon oneself to his withdrawal, to conform to it.

Fashion is not superficial; it is a dynamic tool to transform oneself, and it can be used to command the attention of those around you.

One can’t allow oneself to be bullied into abandoning one’s dream.

If one is reported as having set up camp overseas, it’s as if one has made oneself unavailable.

Artists should be free to create what we want. I believe there’s a special value in work that is a reflection of oneself as opposed to interpretation. When I see a film or a TV show about black people not written by someone who’s black, it’s an interpretation of that life.

When I was 17, a neighbour I knew well died of cancer, and I became au pair to her three little girls. In circumstances like that, when you can’t really help, I think it’s a human response to do something beyond oneself. So I did a sponsored parachute jump for Cancer Research. It was exciting and ridiculous.

If your focus in life is on being productive, when things are not happening… one has to ask oneself, ‘Is this worth a grown man’s time?’

My team at Pittsburgh is the greatest example of unselfishness and giving of oneself. They bought into that, and it’s brought those kids championships, and it’s brought all those kids so much glory.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

I knew ‘Bad Girls’ attracts a younger audience, and it’s vital to get oneself known to that audience because, unless they watch me in re-runs on ‘U.K. Gold,’ they won’t know me from a hole in the ground.

In oneself lies the whole world and if you know how to look and learn, the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either the key or the door to open, except yourself.

Being human always points, and is directed, to something or someone, other than oneself – be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter.

There is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.

Belief in oneself is incredibly infectious. It generates momentum, the collective force of which far outweighs any kernel of self-doubt that may creep in.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

I believe that my father has become an ongoing symbol of what it means to keep on fighting for what is good in oneself, in others, and in our country.

When one does away with oneself one does the most estimable thing possible: one thereby almost deserves to live.

The human contribution is the essential ingredient. It is only in the giving of oneself to others that we truly live.

As a painter today you have to work without that essential platform. But if one does not deceive oneself and accepts this lack of certainty, other things may come into play.

I think one should take criticism in one’s stride and prove oneself. In fact, I would like to thank my critics as their criticism gave me the fire and passion to prove myself.

There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one’s coffee and fill one’s pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.

I don’t believe complete assimilation is possible, at least not for anyone who has an active, open mind. Every step, every entry into the flows of existence can be seen as a beginning, a commencement of a brand new way of seeing oneself in the world. This is the case for everyone.

Belief in oneself is one of the most important bricks in building any successful venture.

If you’re in the media, particularly newspapers, you are in the thick of all the interesting things that are going on in a community, and I can’t imagine any other life that one would want to dedicate oneself to.

One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.