The advantage of doing one’s praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.
In talking about the impact of ideas in one field on ideas in another field, one is always apt to make a fool of oneself.
Every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. There is a saying of the elders that goes, ‘Step from under the eaves and you’re a dead man. Leave the gate and the enemy is waiting.’ This is not a matter of being careful. It is to consider oneself as dead beforehand.
Florida isn’t so much a place where one goes to reinvent oneself, as it is a place where one goes if one no longer wished to be found.
My films have mostly been about the rise of desire as the discovery of oneself.
I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness – to save oneself trouble.
Apparently, blaming oneself for debilitating student debt is common.
Victor Stone’s story is one of acceptance – of self and others. Also, accepting his father for the person he once was, absent from his life until he turned him into Cyborg. And acceptance of oneself in that he is both Cyborg and Victor Stone simultaneously.
Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.
One has the responsibility to oneself, to the writer, director and the people who put up the money, to put out the best of what one has experienced and understood about the human condition as it relates to the role one has been hired to portray.
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.
Maybe scarcity isn’t always a bad thing. Maybe scarcity is something to seek out, to fabricate for oneself.
Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.
The consciousness of knowing how to make oneself useful, how to help mankind in many ways, fills the soul with noble confidence, almost religious dignity.
The great thing about chess is it’s a game for oneself. You don’t work on what you can’t control, you just work on yourself. And I think if more people did that, we’d all be a lot better off.
I think writing is an extension of a childhood habit – the habit of entertaining oneself by taking interesting bits of reality and building upon them.
Religion promotes the divine discontent within oneself, so that one tries to make oneself a better person and draw oneself closer to God.
That the actual practice of meritocracy mostly involves a strenuous quest to avoid any kind of downward mobility, for oneself or for one’s kids, is something every upper-class American understands deep in his or her highly educated bones.
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
One does not substitute oneself for the past, one merely adds to it a new link.
Employ oneself upon trifling professional matters which others could do.
When at a loss about something, go and take counsel by yourself. For in the midst of shouting, the advantageous course is not to be seen, but as one reasons with oneself, it shines out clear.
First, unreliability is not the sole preserve of fictional narrators. Second, the pleasure of patting oneself on the back for seizing on instances of unreliability and ignorance is, as the late Frank Kermode may or may not have pointed out, considerable.
Only by taking responsibility for oneself, to the greatest extent possible, can one ever be free, and only a free person can make responsible choices – between right and wrong, saving and spending, giving or taking.
Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement. I will not try it. Time is the only comforter for the loss of a mother.
There is no excellence without labor. One cannot dream oneself into either usefulness or happiness.
What I do know from my life is the phenomenon of saying, ‘This is too small a thing to argue about’, but then nevertheless finding oneself in that argument.
The Southern whites are in many respects a great people. Looked at from a certain point of view, they are picturesque. If one will put oneself in a romantic frame of mind, one can admire their notions of chivalry and bravery and justice.
Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
To understand is to forgive, even oneself.
Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood.
I always have a very strong sense of shaming oneself, and you can do that a lot in the public eye, so it’s best avoided at all costs I think.
The surest way to be deceived is to consider oneself cleverer than others.
Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.
Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!
What becomes fascinating is the way the culture industry doesn’t deny it and doesn’t try to mitigate it, but tries to sell its products as a way of liberating oneself.
One’s own religion is after all a matter between oneself and one’s Maker and no one else’s.
Life begets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.
If it was necessary to tolerate in other people everything that one permits oneself, life would be unbearable.
What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.
In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn’t merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.
How one can live without being able to judge oneself, criticize what one has accomplished, and still enjoy what one does, is unimaginable to me.
One must not let oneself be overwhelmed by sadness.
Any opportunity to adorn oneself is human, and accessories are an easy way to do it.
I always think that the ability to fight and defend oneself is a skill that every man should have but endeavour never to use, you know?
To desire and expect nothing for oneself and to have profound sympathy for others is genuine holiness.
One could look over the past century and ask oneself, has the increased longevity been good, bad or indifferent?
I think the healthy way to live is to make friends with the beast inside oneself, and that means not the beast but the shadow. The dark side of one’s nature. Have fun with it and you know, is to accept everything about ourselves.
It may be that the most interesting American struggle is the struggle to set oneself free from the limits one is born to, and then to learn something of the value of those limits.
Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self.
It is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph.
To me, ‘The End of the Jews’ – both the title and the novel itself – is about the end of pat, uncritical ways of understanding oneself in the world.
I don’t find writing easy. That is because I do take great care: I rewrite a lot. If anything is sort of clumsy and not possible to read aloud to oneself, which I think one should do… it doesn’t work.
One can not love without opening oneself, and opening oneself, that’s taking the risk of suffering. One does not have control.
When you are running a business, there is a constant need to reinvent oneself. One should have the foresight to stay ahead in times of rapid change and rid ourselves of stickiness in any form in the business.
Being a unique superpower undermines the military intelligence of strategy. To think strategically, one has to imagine oneself in the enemy’s place. If one cannot do this, it is impossible to foresee, to take by surprise, to outflank. Misinterpreting an enemy can lead to defeat. This is how empires fall.
To bear with patience wrongs done to oneself is a mark of perfection, but to bear with patience wrongs done to someone else is a mark of imperfection and even of actual sin.
Every good man progressively becomes God. To become God, to be man, and to educate oneself, are expressions that are synonymous.
I’m firmly convinced that true beauty only springs from the acceptance of oneself, from an awareness of who we really are.
Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.
Giving oneself permission to write to begin with is the first enormous challenge. But you discover that this permission involves a requirement: To write about things that are difficult because they are, in fact, your subject.
