Self Will Quotes

• Grace is always sufficient, provided we are ready to cooperate with it. If we fail to do our share, but rather choose to rely on self-will and self-direction, we shall not only get no help from the graces bestowed on us, we shall actually make it impossible for further graces to be given.

  Aldous Huxley

  Self, Grace, Helping

  Aldous Huxley, Huston Smith (2013). “The Divine Within: Selected Writings on Enlightenment”, p.17, Harper Collins

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• We tend to think that refusing to exalt Christ is staying true to our self-will and personal freedom when really we are condemning ourselves. Sure, we can pretend to stay true to ourselves, but if you want to talk about reality, all of that is completely trivial if this life is an island and He's the only pilot with a plane and a flight plan.

  Criss Jami

  Reality, Thinking, Islands

  Criss Jami (2015). “Killosophy”, p.33, Criss Jami

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• If you give your Self a chance, your Self will give you all the chances.

  Harbhajan Singh Yogi

  Inspirational, Self, Bhajans

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• Kindness to self will put you in the perfect attitude and position to be kind to others.

  Alan Cohen

  Attitude, Kindness, Self

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• Self-will so ardent and active that it will break a world to pieces to make a stool to sit on.

  Richard Cecil

  Inspirational, Motivational, Self

  Richard Cecil, Josiah Pratt (1817). “Remains of the Rev. Richard Cecil”, p.250

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• There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

  Aldous Huxley

  God, Sacrifice, Self

  Aldous Huxley (1953). “The collected works of Aldous Huxley”

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• My heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love.

  George Saunders

  Self, Heartfelt, Wish

  George Saunders (2014). “Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness”, p.42, A&C Black

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• We are the creatures of imagination, passion, and self-will, more than of reason or even of self-interest. Even in the common transactions and daily intercourse of life, we are governed by whim, caprice, prejudice, or accident. The falling of a teacup puts us out of temper for the day; and a quarrel that commenced about the pattern of a gown may end only with our lives.

  William Hazlitt

  Life, Fall, Passion

  William Hazlitt (1904). “The Collected Works of William Hazlitt: Fugitive writings”

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• [The natural life] knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that.

  C. S. Lewis

  Spiritual, Fighting, Self

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.109, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• It is not action or effort that we must surrender; it is self-will, and this is terribly difficult. You must do your best constantly, yet never allow yourself to become involved in whether things work out the way you want.

  Eknath Easwaran

  Self, Work Out, Effort

  Eknath Easwaran (1979). “Like a Thousand Suns: The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Volume II”, p.371, Nilgiri Press

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• A solid sense of self will help a person to lead a full and happy life.

  Kimberly Elise

  Happy Life, Self, Helping

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• The refusal to be creative is an act of self-will and is counter to our true nature. When we are open to our creativity, we are opening to God: good, orderly direction. As we pursue our creative fulfillment, all elements of our life move toward harmony. As we strengthen our creativity, we strengthen our connection to the Creator within. Artists love other artists. Our relationship to God is co-creative, artist to artist. It is God's will for us to live in creative abundance.

  Julia Cameron

  Art, Moving, Creativity

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• Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Self, Literature, Spoken Word

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• The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.

  C. S. Lewis

  Hurt, Pain, Men

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• A little reflection will enable any person to detect in himself that setness in trifles which is the result of the unwatched instinct of self-will and to establish over himself a jealous guardianship.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe

  Jealous, Reflection, Self

  Harriet Beecher Stowe (1866). “Little Foxes, Or, The Little Failings which Mar Domestic Happiness”, p.77

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• Self-will seems to be the only virtue that takes no account of man-made laws.

  Bruce Lee

  Men, Self, Law

  Bruce Lee (2015). “Bruce Lee Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living”, p.70, Tuttle Publishing

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• It is implicit in the self that the self will automatically evolve if you can dissolve it. It re-patterns itself after archetypal formations that exist deep within the mind.

  Frederick Lenz

  Self, Mind, Patterns

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• Even a good self will create another good self in the next life, and another one, and that good self will never be enlightened. You'll be bound, life after life, by good karma.

  Frederick Lenz

  Karma, Self, Next

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• A man only goes and confesses his faults to the world when his self will not acknowledge or listen to them.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Men, Self, World

  Wyndham Lewis (1918). “Tarr”

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• The purely material world seems to have more in common than we with the unchanging and everlasting years of the Great Creator. Yet we know that it is not so. In reality the rocks are less enduring than man. Each man's personal self will still survive for weal or woe, when another catastrophe shall have utterly changed the surface of this planet, and the elements shall have melted with fervent heat, and the earth also and all things that are therein shall have been burnt up.

  Henry Parry Liddon

  Reality, Men, Rocks

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• It hath been said, that there is of nothing so much in hell as of self-will. The which is true, for there is nothing else there than self-will, and if there were no self-will, there would be no Devil and no hell. When it is said that Lucifer fell from Heaven, and turned away from God and the like, it meaneth nothing else than that he would have his own will, and would not be at one with the Eternal Will. So was it likewise with Adam in Paradise. And when we say Self-will, we mean, to will otherwise than as the One and Eternal Will of God willeth.

  Martin Luther

  Mean, Self, Heaven

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• For those who do not make the transition to a matured, more spiritual self-will reason will indeed be no more than rationalization. Here is a prodigious parallel: just as in antiquity the dysdaimonic personality could not appreciate how his mentality was bound in by his characterological (banausic, doulic) biases, so in modernity the facile or abstractivist rationalist cannot comprehend how his "rationality" merely slavishly subserves his appetites, delusions, preconceptions, ideologies, etc.

  Kenny Smith

  Spiritual, Philosophy, Self

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• Bondage is the life of personality, and for bondage the personal self will fight with tireless resourcefulness and the most stubborn cunning.

  Aldous Huxley

  Character, Fighting, Self

  Aldous Huxley (1993). “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: A Novel”, p.111, Ivan R. Dee

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• Humble yourself, you’ll grow greater than the world.Your Self will be revealed to you, without you.

  Rumi

  Humble, Self, World

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• When your heart softens and opens, your being becomes matter in your self. That is the change of matter and what matters to you in your self will change.

  John de Ruiter

  Heart, What Matters, Self

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