Oneself Quotes - Page 10

• Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

  Alain de Botton

  Inspirational, Obvious Things, Too Late

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• I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.

  Virginia Woolf

  Beautiful, Healing, Delight

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.48, Delphi Classics

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• ... one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.

  Aldous Huxley

  Thinking

  Aldous Huxley (2015). “Crome Yellow”, p.82, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• The main thing is to remain oneself, under any circumstances; that was and is our common purpose.

  Madeleine Albright

  Common Purpose, Circumstances, Purpose

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• There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared. It is itself the great venture and can never be safe. Peace is the opposite of security. To demand guarantees is to want to protect oneself. Peace means giving oneself completely to God's commandment. Wanting no security, but in faith and obedience laying the destiny of the nations in the hand of almighty God. Not trying to direct it for selfish purposes. Battles are won not with weapons, but with God. They are won when the way leads to the cross.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Selfish, Mean, Destiny

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• Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is knowledge of oneself.

  Alan Watts

  Laughter, Humanity

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• Conventions vs. spontaneity. This is a dialectical choice, it depends on the assessment you make of your own times. If you judge that your own time is ridden with empty insincere formalities, you plump for spontaneity, for indecorous behavior even...Much of morality is the task of compensating for one's age. One assumes unfashionable virtues, in an indecorous time. In a time hollowed out by decorum, one must school oneself in spontaneity.

  Susan Sontag

  School, Assessment, Judging

  Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.135, Macmillan

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• to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing

  David Lodge

  Curiosity, Desire, Trying

  David Lodge (2012). “Small World”, p.27, Random House

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• I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections. and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill. I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self, and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help and patience, and a certain difficult repentance long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Mistake, Emotional, Self

  D. H. Lawrence (2008). “Complete Poems by Lawrence: Easyread Super Large 24pt Edition”, p.160, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable, reactions to what life has dealt.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Essentials, Substance, Behavior

  FaceBook post by Kay Redfield Jamison from Jul 26, 2012

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• It's impossible to defend oneself in the absence of goodwill

  Franz Kafka

  Impossible, Absence, Goodwill

  Franz Kafka (2008). “Amerika: The Missing Person: A New Translation, Based on the Restored Text”, p.166, Schocken

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• One must not live one's life through men but must be complete on oneself as a woman of substance.

  Helen Fielding

  Men, Substance

  Helen Fielding (2016). “Bridget Jones's Diary: Picador Classic”, p.27, Pan Macmillan

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• It is not merely enough to love literature if one wishes to spend one's life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possiblity of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear.

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Mean, Discovery

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• One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breath, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives - transitoriness and oblivion.

  Stefan Zweig

  Book, Fate, Order

  Stefan Zweig (2009). “Selected Stories”, p.126, Pushkin Press

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• To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Decision, Moral

  Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.69, Open Road Media

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• To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

  Virginia Woolf

  Being Alone, Darkness, Invisible

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.296, Wordsworth Editions

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• To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.

  Voltaire

  Praying, Praying To God

  Voltaire's Notebooks (c.1735-c.1750),

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• To engage in a battle, one must know oneself, believe in oneself, and overcome one's own obstacle

  Yuu Watase

  Believe, Battle, Overcoming

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• There aren't many such enthusiasts born. The average person is not especially curious about the world. He is alive, and being somehow obliged to deal with this condition, feels the less effort it requires, the better. Whereas learning about the world is labor, and a great all-consuming one at that. Most people develop quite antithetical talents, in fact - to look without seeing, to listen without hearing, mainly to preserve onself within oneself.

  Ryszard Kapuscinski

  Average, People, Effort

  Ryszard Kapuscinski (2009). “Travels with Herodotus”, p.267, Vintage

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• Writer’s block is my unconscious mind telling me that something I’ve just written is either unbelievable or unimportant to me, and I solve it by going back and reinventing some part of what I’ve already written so that when I write it again, it is believable and interesting to me. Then I can go on. Writer’s block is never solved by forcing oneself to “write through it,” because you haven’t solved the problem that caused your unconscious mind to rebel against the story, so it still won’t work – for you or for the reader.

  Orson Scott Card

  Block, Writing, Interesting

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• In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Happiness, Forget, Corners

  Robert Louis Stevenson (2015). “The Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Plays, Memoirs, Travel Sketches, Letters and Essays (Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer, containing Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, Catriona and A Child's Garden of Verses”, p.4651, e-artnow

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• When there is suffering, we look for a reason. That reason is easiest found within oneself.

  Clare Vanderpool

  Suffering, Looks, Reason

  Clare Vanderpool (2010). “Moon Over Manifest”, p.154, Delacorte Books for Young Readers

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• All companionship can consist in only the strengthening of neighboring solitudes, giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to become closer to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling – I have learned over and over again, there is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another.

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  Fall, Order, Two

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• There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.

  Chinua Achebe

  Thinking, Allies, Moral

  Chinua Achebe (2012). “There Was a Country: A Memoir”, p.50, Penguin

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• Early on, I learnt from the Russian intelligentsia that the only meaning of life lies in conscious participation in the making of history. The more I think of that, the more deeply true it seems to be. It follows that one must range oneself actively against everything that diminishes man, and involve oneself in all struggles which tend to liberate and enlarge him. This categorical imperative is by no way lessened by the fact that such an involvement is inevitably soiled by error: it is a worse error merely to live for oneself, caught within traditions which are soiled by inhumanity.

  Victor Serge

  Lying, Struggle, Men

  Victor Serge (2002). “Memoirs of a Revolutionary”, p.374, University of Iowa Press

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