Famous Quotes & Sayings

Oliver Goldsmith

The premises being thus settled, I proceed to observe that the concatenation of self-existence, proceeding in a reciprocal duplicate ratio, naturally produces a problematical dialogism, which in some measure proves that the essence of spirituality may be referred to the second predicable.

Margaret Atwood

To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self.

Margaret Atwood

Remember,' she'd tell her staff, 'every customer wants to feel like a princess, and princesses are selfish and overbearing.

Margaret Atwood

Things might have been different if she hadn't been able to drift; if she'd had to concentrate on her next meal, instead of dwelling on all the injuries she felt we'd done her. An unearned income encourages self-pity in those already prone to it.

Margaret Atwood

I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.

Marcus Thomas

You do not need to be fixed. You are not broken. You have never been broken. You are not in parts. These are just thoughts. These are just beliefs. Accept your self, where you are in this moment. Accept your wholeness. That is freedom.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

The spirit is the true self, not that physical figure which can be pointed out by your finger.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Most happy is he who is entirely self-reliant, and who centers all his requirements in himself alone.

Marcel Duchamp

All decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis.

Marc Almond

I'm often prone to self-doubt about everything I do.

Kevin Mitnick

You can never protect yourself 100%. What you do is protect your self as much as possible and mitigate risk to an acceptable degree. You can never remove all risk.

Kenny Smith

Always, a form of self-equilibration, a soul or psyche, is trying to assert itself, to continue the melody of its self-realized life.

Kenny Smith

It is the cruelest of all ironies that moderns imagine themselves to be (abstractly understood) "individuals," because in actuality moderns are "types," abstracted and self-abstractive victims of a process of stereotyping that afflicts even would-be rebels and anarchists.

Kenny Smith

Human cultures are all experiments in trying to find a form that will fit the matter of our immediacy; but it is absolutely not the case that all such experiments are of equal merit or value. Some cultures - and modernity is patently one - have managed to transmute consciousness into the "disease" that Nietzsche called it, the self-affliction of a self-centeredness that has purged itself of all vestiges of wisdom and value.

Kenny Smith

There is no extrahistorical or eternalist or abstractivistically pure standpoint where we can get oriented in the absolute Truth per se before dealing with the concrete lineaments of how we happen exist in this time and place. We are participants in a dynamic system and we know its profile only by its action in organizing how we interact together and how we see our own selves. "The truth is the whole," and the whole is a system of living energy: our life as human and historical spirits.

Kenny Smith

The will and self are ultimately dynamic, they are their actions. This energy can be trained and directed, tuned like an orchestra. It is not a matter of a "rational interior" that poses a problem for a decorator, rather a feng-shui intelligence is called for that orients the "house" to the flow of life that takes place in it (I rather suspect this is turned on its head in most cases of feng-shui, i.e. Americans capitulate once again to "experts").

Kelly Corrigan

He defined me first, as parents do. Those early characterizations can become the shimmering self-image we embrace or the limited, stifling perception we rail against for a lifetime.

Margaret Thatcher

Communism produces neither dignity nor prosperity. It takes all power away from the people and places it in the hands of a self-appointed elite. And because it distorts and manipulates the distinctive talents of individuals rather than letting those talents flourish, it prevents progress and prosperity.

Margaret Thatcher

I came to office with one deliberate intent: to change Britain from a dependent to a self-reliant society -- from a give-it-to-me, to a do-it-yourself nation. A get-up-and-go, instead of a sit-back-and-wait-for-it Britain.

Margaret Thatcher

For every idealistic peacemaker willing to renounce his self-defence in favour of a weapons-free world, there is at least one warmaker anxious to exploit the other's good intentions.

Margaret Chase Smith

I speak as briefly as possible because too much harm has already been done with irresponsible words of bitterness and selfish political opportunism. I speak as simply as possible because the issue is too great to be obscured by eloquence. I speak simply and briefly in the hope that my words will be taken to heart.

Margaret Bourke-White

The very secret of life for mewas to maintain in the midst of rushing events an inner tranquility. I had picked a life that dealt with excitement, tragedy, mass calamities, human triumphs and suffering. To throw my whole self into recording and attempting to understand these things, I needed an inner serenity as a kind of balance.

Margaret Deland

In connection with death, or birth, or love, modesty is only a rather puerile self-consciousness.

Margaret Cho

That we are selfish gives us the opportunity to gain the power so that, in time, we might be selfless. To give back what we have learned. To teach what we know, and shorten the journey for those who will come after us.

Margaret Atwood

In his student days, he used to argue that if a woman has no other course open to her but starvation, prostitution, or throwing herself from a bridge, then surely the prostitute, who has shown the most tenacious instinct for self-preservation, should be considered stronger and saner than her frailer and no longer living sisters. One couldn't have it both ways, he'd pointed out: if women are seduced and abandoned they're supposed to go mad, but if they survive, and seduce in their turn, then they were mad to begin with.

Mark Twain

It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many can successfully resist. What is its seat? The inborn requirement of self-approval.

Elia Kazan

You have no idea how fragile an actor's self-worth is.

Barbara Ehrenreich

the fastest-growing brand of religion is of the magical 'name it and claim it' variety, in which the deity exists only to meet one's immediate, self-identified needs.

Paul Wesley

I started working in front of the camera for the first time when I was 15 years old. I joined a soap opera. We filmed in Brooklyn and I would skip class to shoot my scenes. It was terrifying and I entirely self-conscious in front of the camera.

Paul Watzlawick

A self-fulfilling prophecy is an assumption or prediction that, purely as a result of having been made, cause the expected or predicted event to occur and thus confirms its own 'accuracy.'

Paul Weyrich

Self-professed liberals are only 15 to 20% of the electorate.

Paul Weyrich

Self-professed conservatives comprise about 40% to 45% of the electorate.

Paul Wellstone

The best kind of politics is when you help people become their own best selves.