Calling oneself a hero after making mistakes shouldn’t earn public trust.
As one grows older one becomes more critical of oneself and less of other people.
The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.
After adolescence, if one’s life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes.
It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise.
My experience has been that work is almost the best way to pull oneself out of the depths.
Violence, even well intentioned, always rebounds upon oneself.
Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.
Sport is and should remain a great school of life that supports young people in their personal development. It teaches respect for others and also for oneself.
I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.
To be a Christian who is willing to travel with Christ on his downward road requires being willing to detach oneself constantly from any need to be relevant, and to trust ever more deeply the Word of God.
At times, it appears easy to sermonise on morality and ethics. But morality and ethics appear good only when applied to others, never on oneself.
I have that precious commodity – freedom. I can live my life a day at a time, and I am open to whatever the next day brings. I know I sound as if I have been off with some guru in India, but I haven’t. I’ve come to realise the value of being able to decide for oneself.
What one hides is worth neither more nor less than what one finds. And what one hides from oneself is worth neither more nor less than what one allows others to find.
I’ve had an addiction for a long time to the whole business of maximizing one’s potential, what I call human activation. The vehicle for actualizing oneself is choice, options, seeking out the proper choices.
The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.
It is selfish to concern oneself with tragedies.
Foreign policy should not be justified through making oneself feel good, but through results that have tangible consequences.
I realise there’s an innate paradox in promoting oneself on the one hand and saying, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be famous,’ on the other.
The contemplative life is often miserable. One must act more, think less, and not watch oneself live.
It’s hard to define change in oneself unless something really dramatic happens, like you give up some vice, fall in love, or something like that.
The way to put oneself in a position to take the harder, more honorable political path is to argue for one’s virtues in a vigorous way.
It is important to express oneself… provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience.
A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke – and that the joke is oneself.
Rereading one’s own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print – ‘The Very Model of a Man’ is the only novel of mine that has – and so crops up infrequently in conversations with readers or indeed with oneself, revisiting it can be perilous.
