Top 50 Self-Help Quotes

I start with something that makes me angry or confused, and then I write about it. It’s a form of self-help.

I actually really wish I had written ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying’ as an unreliably narrated novel that is also a self-help book.

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, ‘Where’s the self-help section?’ She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

I never read a self-help book except for the Bible.

The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual.

I’m totally into new age and self-help books. I used to work in a bookstore and that’s the section they gave me, and I got way into it. I just loved the power of positive thinking, letting yourself go.

How any person decides to emphasize strengths and mitigate weaknesses is something people have to figure out for themselves. I’m wary of the self-help literature that suggests there are certain rules. I’m very happy for people to look at my story and say it’s possible to achieve many things.

I don’t think of literary novels as self-help documents, although literature undoubtedly saved my life when I was young, enabling me to disappear into all manner of stories, to recognise feelings that I felt alone in.

It’s no accident that most self-help groups use ‘anonymous’ in their names; to Americans, the first step toward redemption is a ritual wiping out of the self, followed by the construction of a new one.

I don’t usually read self-help books, but I read a great book by a guy called Wayne Dyer: ‘The Power of Intention,’ which I loved.

As a business consultant, I am a voracious reader of self-help books, case studies of thriving companies, and the biographies and autobiographies of the world’s most successful people. I relentlessly implement the best ideas into my businesses.

I go to a lot of self-help groups in the day, and then I can sleep pretty well at night.

Business coaching and the personal development and self-help industry is considered to be one of the booming industries today.

What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense. They have no sense that life is fundamentally incomplete rather than accidentally incomplete.

Human beings have kicked around the concept of what individual happiness means for centuries, from the Bible to the ancient Greeks to the 1859 bestseller ‘Self-Help.’

I worked at a nursing home though high school… There’s a lost appreciation for a generation that has so much to tell us when we’re so full of self-help books and doctors on TV.

Memory enhancement self-help programs abound and promise improved memory performance by the utilization of any number of seemingly unique techniques focused on the context of how information is encoded.

So many self-help ideas are like meringue – you take a big bite, and there’s nothing there.

Music is gathering. Taking our scattered thoughts and senses and coalescing us back into our core. Music is powerful. The first few chords can change us where no self-help books can.

Many people come to self-help material because they feel like something is wrong with them or the way they are. The problem is that anything that tells you how to improve your life is also implying that there is something inherently wrong with you the way you are.

Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.

I do believe in self-help.

I’m really wary of self-help books.

When I look for self-help books for myself, I used to be scared that I was going to pick up a book that would depress me even more.

I’m not that into reading. If I’m gonna read, I’m gonna read some cool sci-fi book or something, not some stupid self-help book.

I don’t read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don’t read self-help books because I don’t believe in shortcuts and loopholes.

I’m really into Deepak Chopra and self-help books.

I recommend anybody go to a bookstore, go down the self-help or new-age section, and just walk those aisles. See what book jumps out at you; there’s a good chance it’s a book you need in your life. That’s basically how I find the books that I read.

My favorite books are psychology, self-help, and I’m fascinated by Jung, by dream work.

Pain is important, and changing who you are is difficult, painful, and scary. Most of the self-help industry sees change as this euphoric, liberating thing and tells you that you can be happy all the time. I think the opposite.

I think that there is a tragic misfit at the core of me, and I’ve just done a lot of work on myself. I love a good self-help book; I’ve read a ton of them. I love self-help seminars and therapy and all that.

I was inspired by self-help books.

Like every other self-respecting academic, I’m distrustful of self-help books.

I felt that no self-help book had been written for millennials yet, so my ultimate goal was to write it.

The one genre I’m not really into: self-help books.

While I ridicule books of self-help, I’m also quite susceptible to them. They help simplify things.

My interest in self-help began when I was a child in the Seventies. My mum had a book she would consult regularly: ‘Passages’ by Gail Sheehy, which deals with the challenging stages of growing up.

I’m not a great believer in self-help.

I didn’t intend ‘Hector’ to be a self-help book when I first started writing. I wrote it as a little tale about a psychiatrist, like me, who sets off around the world in order to discover the vital ingredients for happiness.

One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking.

I’ve read, like, 10,000 self-help books.

I dislike the word ‘self-help.’ Self-awareness, yes, but not self-help.

Self-help is something that I’ve always been into. I thought I was going to be a psychiatrist.

I have had moments where I’ve had mental-health issues and I’ve felt like yoga and meditating and reading these Buddhist self-help books actually really help.

I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.

I consider the indiscriminate propagation of self-help to be morally unacceptable… self-help is the opposite of autonomous or vernacular life.

Many self-help books give you these neat, tidy formulas that are really illusions. They dupe people into thinking, ‘Well if I can just do that, then everything’s going to be okay.’ My work differs in that I don’t offer quick solutions and simple explanations.

All summer, I read fiction because you must read for the pleasure and beauty of it, and not only for research. I don’t read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don’t read self-help books because I don’t believe in shortcuts and loopholes.

This is what he has been selling on the ‘The Apprentice’, through his self-help books, how to – you know, ‘Trump 101’ or the ‘Art of the Deal’ or, really, back to ‘Art of the Deal’. So almost the more he gets away with, the more he is reinforcing his brand.

Self-help books are for the birds. Self-help groups are where it’s at.