In Queen Mary’s, which was an all-girls’ college, I learned discipline, hard work and to be competitive. But at Madras Film Institute, I learned about the world, being free and knowledgeable, and thinking beyond oneself.
Prayer provides an opportunity to remind oneself of how one should be living, our responsibilities to others, our own failings, and our relative good fortune, should we have it. This is, I think, a pretty worthwhile practice and it is not something you can only do if you believe you are talking to an unseen creator.
There is nothing greater than the joy of composing something oneself and then listening to it.
It takes a long time to free oneself from chatter – goals, social media, image, persona. And if you’re able to move through in that way, you can actually start trying to create from a different place.
Self-respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.
An idea’s birth is legitimate if one has the feeling that one is catching oneself plagiarizing oneself.
I feel very lucky, and the work that I do doesn’t depend on much. If your vision’s still good, and your hands – I have no arthritis in my hands, and I play the piano very easily – I don’t think there’s any reason to deprive oneself of the fun of working. Music is so rewarding.
A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself.
I think poetry is best read to oneself.
To accuse others for one’s own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.
One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love – any love – reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.
You must learn to perceive as your self that which lies outside you. Looking only within oneself leads to a hardening in oneself, to a higher egotism.
One must keep challenging oneself to do well in any profession.
I can only say that one’s individual situation is more real and important to oneself than the devastations of fates and empires especially when they do not vitally affect oneself.
Reminding oneself that not all rules are good rules and sometimes it’s good to challenge them is an important part of being an effective parliamentarian.
Nothing is harder than to accept oneself.
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
Experience has shown me that standing by oneself reading from one’s book isn’t especially compelling – unless you’re David Sedaris.
I am one of the few singers who has reinvented oneself with every song.
Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations – but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible betrayal that can tear apart not only another person, not only oneself, but whole families.
Everyone writes in Tolstoy’s shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
When one takes action for others, one’s own suffering is transformed into the energy that can keep one moving forward; a light of hope illuminating a new tomorrow for oneself and others is kindled.
Everyone should pursue whatever is original in oneself. That’s the way for a long life in music.
Offspring, the due performance on religious rites, faithful service, highest conjugal happiness and heavenly bliss for the ancestors and oneself, depend on one’s wife alone.
I’d be so fascinated to talk to a psychologist or sociologist about the deep psychological impact of seeing oneself represented. I don’t think we’ve really touched the surface of what it does to the psyche of a people if the only image of you out there is negative. Or if it’s never out there.
Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce.
One does afford oneself the luxury to come into the studio and all day, every day, spend one’s life making aesthetic propositions. What an immense luxury.
Imagine trying to be a gay actor, a gay anything in modern Russia? Where to be positively oneself, to be affectionate in public with someone you love of the same gender, or to talk of that love in the hearing of anyone under 18, will put you prison?
Valor’ is a word we don’t commonly hear. People can show courage and bravery confronting many different challenges in life. But ‘valor’ connotes willingly putting oneself in mortal danger to protect others.
One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.
The right to defend oneself is something that should never require us to be on a list, it should never require us to pay a tax, it should never require us to wait to be able to purchase a firearm to defend ourselves, it should never require rules or shame, or condemnation from another American.
No one in al-Nahda believes that jihad is a way to impose Islam on the world. But we believe that jihad is self-control, is social and political struggle, and even military jihad is only a way to defend oneself in the case of aggression.
Faith in oneself is the best and safest course.
I think it’s important for one to take a certain distance from oneself.
I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.
If you’re a short-seller, that’s a cacophony of negative reinforcement. You’re basically told that you’re wrong in every way imaginable every day. It takes a certain type of individual to drown that noise and negative reinforcement out and to remind oneself that their work is accurate and what they’re hearing is not.
Grooming oneself with all the crazed compulsion of an under-exercised lab rat in order to hook a rich man and obtain a lush lifestyle makes a certain (albeit seedy) sense.
Development of outlook naturally begins with a respect for God… Reverence to God and reverence for one’s neighbor and reverence for oneself as a servant of God.
To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.
A value is valuable when the value of value is valuable to oneself.
It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.
In truth, to know oneself seems to be the hardest of all things. Not only our eye, which observes external objects, does not use the sense of sight upon itself, but even our mind, which contemplates intently another’s sin, is slow in the recognition of its own defects.
To sustain oneself, one should learn to not take success or failure too seriously. You just need the confidence to stand there and say ‘Even if I fall, I can get up.’
We are all murderers and prostitutes – no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.
Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.
We have never considered our brand superior or inferior to any other one, and we have never spoken about our work in comparison to anyone else’s. We are ourselves; we have never had the presumption to please everyone, but we believe in the utmost liberty to express oneself.
My painting is visible images which conceal nothing… they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question ‘What does that mean’? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.
Nobody can teach what is inside a person; it has to be discovered for oneself and a way must be found to express it.
It is, finally, a word is untimely in three different senses, and bearing it as one’s treasure will not win one anyone’s favours; one rather risks finding oneself outside everyone’s camp… Beauty is the word that shall be our first.
To my mind, one does not put oneself in place of the past; one only adds a new link.
A four-year-old should have no self-esteem, and for good reason. What could he have possibly accomplished in his life to justify esteeming oneself so highly?
And there isn’t any way that one can get rid of the guilt of having a nice body by saying that one can serve society with it, because that would end up with oneself as what? There simply doesn’t seem to be any moral place for flesh.
I find putting oneself out there difficult. I think writing and sharing writing require different skill sets. I want to be read, but it takes courage to ask someone to read your work.
Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one’s outlook; it only confirms one’s idea that one is unique.
I enjoy popularisation and I think I’m reasonably good at it. I also think it’s a duty. It’s just so pedagogically stupid to forget how difficult one found these ideas oneself to begin with.
Drama read to oneself is never drama at its best, and is not even drama as it should be.
In America, everybody thinks they’re an entrepreneur. That’s the problem. It’s not a title that anybody should call oneself.
