Famous Quotes & Sayings

Logan Pearsall Smith

People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.

Manolo Blahnik

I do enjoy my own company. I cannot imagine anybody entertaining me more than I do. If it sounds selfish, I don't care. I made it a religion almost.

Madeline Kahn

I don't like to be my own audience, I find that being my own audience, being in the audience, makes me self-conscious, basically. So I tune in sometimes, with the sound off, to check it out and I back up to it. In the future I will look at it when some time has passed.

Lucy Larcom

A journal of the 'subjective' kind I have always thought foolish, as nurturing a morbid self -consciousness in the writer; and yet, alone so much as I am, it is well to have some sort of a ventilator from the interior.

Lucy Maud Montgomery

If any person wants to see clearly just how much she has changed - whether for better or worse - let her revisit after some lapse of time any place where she has ones lived. She will meet her former self at every turn, with every familiar face, in every old recollection ... She will see how much she has gained in some respects, how much she has lost - irretrievably lost - in others.

Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

It's a hell of a thing to be born, and if you're born you're at least entitled to your own self.

Louisa May Alcott

…it is so much better to work for others than for one's self alone.

John Glenn

If there is one thing I’ve learned in my years on this planet, it’s that the happiest and most fulfilled people I’ve known are those who devoted themselves to something bigger and more profound than merely their own self interest.

John Fowles

How can one build a better self unless on the ruins of the old?

John Fowles

Adulthood is not an age, but a stage of knowledge of self.

John F. Kennedy

I am not so much concerned with the right of everyone to say anything he pleases as I am about our need as a self-governing people to hear everything relevant.

John F. Kennedy

Our labor unions are not narrow, self-seeking groups. They have raised wages, shortened hours, and provided supplemental benefits. Through collective bargaining and grievance procedures, they have brought justice and democracy to the shop floor.

Jonathan Lethem

Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.

Jonathan Lethem

But the day I can't shrug off a twinge of self-pity, is the day I'm washed up for keeps.

Jonathan Haidt

Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence.

Jonathan Haidt

Liberals have difficulty understanding the Tea Party because they think it is a bunch of selfish racists. But I think the Tea Party is driven in large part by concerns about fairness.

Jonathan Franzen

Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.

Jonathan Franzen

So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, "It's nothing." "Self-inflicted. You pathetic American." "Different kind of prison" Chip said.

Jonathan Franzen

It seems to me self-evident that if you have a life, things happen in it, and certain things do change; certain things end. People you know die.

Jonathan Edwards

Whether God has decreed all things that ever come to pass or not, all that own the being of a God, own that He knows all things beforehand. Now, it is self-evident that if He knows all things beforehand, He either doth approve of them or doth not approve of them; that is, He either is willing they should be, or He is not willing they should be. But to will that they should be is to decree them.

Jonathan Edwards

Assurance is not to be obtained so much by self-examination as by action

Jonathan Ames

I promote my own self-hatred.

Jonathan Ames

I'm actually much more shy and self-conscious than people's perception of me.

Jonas Salk

It is possible to create an epidemic of health which is self-organizing and self-propelling.

Joyce Carol Oates

I compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms - they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I'm surprised by the high, poetic quality of Twitter - it lends itself to a surreal sort of self-expression.

Joyce Carol Oates

Evil isn't a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior.

Joyce Carol Oates

Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose.

Joyce Carol Oates

Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the 'self' see the 'self' with any objectivity?

Joyce Carol Oates

My self is all to me. I don't have any need of you.

Justin Vernon

You should be able to have happiness. If you don't have that, then you're not really bringing your whole self to the relationship.

Julie Delpy

I did a film that I shot in 24 hours that was self-financed for $5,000. It was a feature called Looking For Jimmy that I shot with a bunch of friends. I spent eight months editing because we had 24 hours of footage that made no sense and I learned a lot about directing while editing that film.

Julie Burchill

People - and I include myself - get fat because they choose pleasure over self-denial.

Josh Hutcherson

You have to maintain who you are as a person and stay true to yourself - that's my biggest moral as a human being, as well as a very self-deprecating sense of humor.