Oneself Quotes - Page 11

• One criticizes in others what one recognizes and despises in oneself. For example, an artist who is revolted by another’s ambitiousness.

  Susan Sontag

  Artist, Example, Despise

  Susan Sontag (2012). “As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980”, p.64, Macmillan

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• One begins by plaguing oneself to no purpose in order to be true to nature, and one concludes by working quietly from one's own palette alone, and then nature is the result.

  Vincent Van Gogh

  Order, Purpose, Results

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• Every achievement, every step forward in knowledge, is the consequence of courage, of toughness towards oneself, of sincerity to oneself

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Achievement, Steps, Sincerity

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• Much of living is an attempt to preserve oneself by annexing and occupying others.

  Janet Frame

  Preserves

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• Its was one of those events which at a crucial stage in one's development arrive to challenge and stretch one to the limit of one's ability and beyond, so that thereafter one has a new standard by which to judge oneself.

  Kazuo Ishiguro

  Judging, Challenges, Events

  Kazuo Ishiguro (1989). “The Remains of the Day”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

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• The underlying struggle - between worlds of plenty and worlds of want; between the modern and the ancient; between those who embrace our teeming, colliding, irksome diversity, while still insisting on a set of values that binds us together, and those who would seek, under whatever flag or slogan or sacred text, a certainty and simplification that justifies cruelty toward those not like us.

  Barack Obama

  Struggle, Diversity, Together

  Barack Obama (2007). “Dreams From My Father”, p.10, Canongate Books

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• Trust is a good way to get oneself killed

  Lauren Kate

  Way, Good Way

  Lauren Kate (2013). “The Fallen Series: 4-Book Collection”, p.1104, Delacorte Press

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• To understand a profound thought is to have, at the moment one understands it, a profound thought oneself; and this demands some effort, a genuine descent to the heart of oneself . . . Only desire and love give us the strength to make this effort. The only books that we truly absorb are those we read with real appetite, after having worked hard to get them, so great had been our need of them.

  Marcel Proust

  Real, Book, Heart

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• There is nothing one fears more or is more ashamed of than not being oneself. Yet few people realize even an approximation of their true potential. Most people must live with varying degrees of the shame and fear of not being fully in control of themselves.

  William S. Burroughs

  People, Degrees, Realizing

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• At night, lying on your back and staring at the falling snow, it's easy to imagine oneself soaring through the stars.

  Craig Thompson

  Stars, Lying, Fall

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• He leaned up a little and watched her face. Her face would now be, forever, more mysterious and impenetrable than the face of any stranger. Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But 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.

  James A. Baldwin

  Imagination, Forever, Secret

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• Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude — even dishonor and betrayal — to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self-effacement, surrender to the “others,” disavowal of any personal dignity or freedom — on the one hand; and freedom and independence, movement away from the others, extrication of oneself from the binding links of family and social duties-on the other hand. This is the choice that the depressed person actually faces.

  Ernest Becker

  Betrayal, Real, Depressed Person

  "The Denial of Death".

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• To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one's self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.

  Gilles Deleuze

  Self, Order, Voyages

  Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari (2004). “EPZ Thousand Plateaus”, p.218, A&C Black

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• Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear. Just as vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people. And falsehoods the truths of other people. Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself. To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

  Oscar Wilde

  Fashion, Husband, Vulgarity Is

  "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young" (1894)

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• Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself.

  Edward St Aubyn

  Usual, Clinging, Stuck

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• To love! To surrender absolutely, to prostrate oneself before the divine image, to die a thousand imaginary deaths, to annihilate every trace of self, to find the whole universe embodied and enshrined in the living image of another! Adolescent, we say. Rot! This is the germ of the future life, the seed which we hide away, which we bury deep within us, which we smother and stifle and do our utmost to destroy as we advance from one experience to another and flutter and flounder and lose our way.

  Henry Miller

  Self, Way, Germs

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• One can give up many things for love, but one should not give up oneself.

  Cassandra Clare

  Giving Up, Should, Not Giving Up

  Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan (2013). “Vampires, Scones, and Edmund Herondale”, p.32, Simon and Schuster

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• There were people thrice her size on the Trenton platform and she looked admiringly at one of them, a woman in a very short skirt. She thought nothing of slender legs shown off in miniskirts--it was safe and easy, after all, to display legs of which the world approved--but the fat woman's act was about the quiet conviction that one shared only with oneself, a sense of rightness that others failed to see.

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  People, World, Legs

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013). “Americanah”, p.14, Anchor

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• What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never know why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even know themselves. Nobody understands anybody.

  Orson Scott Card

  Thinking, People, Laughing

  Orson Scott Card (2013). “The Shadow Saga Omnibus”, p.422, Hachette UK

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• I spent a long time looking at faces, drinking in smiles. Am I happy or unhappy? It’s not a very important question. I live with such frenzied intensity. Things and people are waiting for me, and doubtless I am waiting for them and desiring them with all my strength and sadness. But, here, I earn the right to be alive by silence and by secrecy. The miracle of not having to talk about oneself.

  Albert Camus

  Drinking, Sadness, Long

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• Immersing oneself in the problems of a book is a good way to keep from thinking of love.

  Orhan Pamuk

  Book, Thinking, Way

  Orhan Pamuk (2011). “Snow”, p.388, Faber & Faber

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• The problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Space, World, Satisfaction

  Jonathan Franzen (2012). “Farther Away: Essays”, p.41, Macmillan

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• It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right --especially when one is right.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Philosophical, Noble, Nobility

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1977). “The Portable Nietzsche”, p.115, Penguin

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• It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Years, Long, Done

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2014). “An Unquiet Mind: A memoir of moods and madness”, p.10, Pan Macmillan

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• One can get just as much exultation in losing oneself in a little thing as in a big thing. It is nice to think how one can be recklessly lost in a daisy.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Time, Nice, Thinking

  ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH (1973). “BRING ME A UNICORN”

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