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1 " Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love. "
― M. Scott Peck
2 " My dear Watson," said [Sherlock Holmes], " I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one's self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one's own powers. "
3 " If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside one's self is like the heat in an oven. It makes passable Bath buns. But inspiration from within is like a volcano: It changes the face of the world. "
― Alan Bradley , The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag (Flavia de Luce, #2)
4 " Whatever may have been said of the satiety of pleasure and of the disgust which usually follows passion, any man who has anything of a heart and who is not wretchedly and hopelessly blasé feels his love increased by his happiness, and very often the best way to retain a lover ready to leave is to give one's self up to him without reserve. "
― Théophile Gautier , Mademoiselle de Maupin
5 " It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable, honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world, but it is very possible to know how it has touched one's self in going by. "
― Charles Dickens , Great Expectations
6 " Life is absolutely a game, but technically there is no winner or looser. Because there is no universally established rule for the game. Every player defines the rules as the individual prefers. Therefore, most of the times you are playing with the rules of others, which you are not even familiar with. Such game [apparently] has determined the distinction between winners and losers, not according to the individual's own abilities, but based on how a person satisfies other players and their expectations. More alienated from one's self means greater chance and closer to be called a winner, and more authentic if a person is more will be forced toward the loser title. "
― Kambiz Shabankare
7 " The only absolute truth is change, and death is the only way to stop change. Life is a series of judgments on changing situations, and no ideal, no belief fits every solution. Yet humans need to believe in something beyond themselves. Perhaps all intelligences do. If we do not act on higher motivations, then we can justify any action, no matter how horrible, as necessary for our survival. We are endlessly caught between the need for high moral absolutes—which will fail enough that any absolute can be demonstrated as false—and our tendency for individual judgments to degenerate into self-gratifying and unethical narcissism. Trying to force absolutes on others results in death and destruction, yet failing to act beyond one's self also leads to death and destruction, generally a lot sooner. "
― L.E. Modesitt Jr. , The Parafaith War (Parafaith, #1)
8 " The moment we care for anything deeply, the world - that is, all the other miscellaneous interests - becomes our enemy. Christians showed it when they talked of keeping one's self " unspotted from the world;" but lovers talk of it just as much when they talk of the " world well lost." Astronomically speaking, I understand that England is situated on the world; similarly, I suppose that the Church was a part of the world, and even the lovers inhabitants of that orb. But they all felt a certain truth - the truth that the moment you love anything the world becomes your foe. "
9 " Arguing with one's self is beneficial.Out of all the million voices in my head screaming for your death, you're lucky I heeded the one that wants to spare you this time. "
― Kevin Bascon
10 " It is true, Monsieur," Raoule went on, shrugging her shoulders, " that I have had lovers in my life as I have books in my library, to know, to study. But I have had no passion, I have not written my own book yet! I always found myself alone when we were two. One is not weak when one remains master of one's self in the midst of the most stupefying pleasures. "
11 " The true purpose of life is the perfection of humanity through individual effort, under the guidance of God's inspiration. Real life is response to the best within us. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, is to deprive one's self of the real joy of living. "
― David O. McKay
12 " Doing something for the mere joy of it—for one's self or others—is quite possibly one of the best returns on an investment of time that a person can receive. "
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13 " Acceptance" is a very important word in our lives. People drive themselves into madness and death thinking about the chasm that exists between their ideals and their actual reality that they are living. There must be a balance between improvement of one's self and one's circumstances and the acceptance of reality. There is a beautiful dance that one must learn, which involves embracing the reality of your life as you would embrace a Latin dance partner on the ballroom floor, and moving that partner (your reality) in graceful strides, towards where you want to be situated, on that dance floor. If you dance with no partner (your current reality), you will arrive at your destination empty. Empty. That is, if you ever arrive at all. But when you dance with that partner, embracing and accepting it for all of its flaws and its redeeming qualities, you will be able to move across that dance floor as a full, whole person. Wherever you end up stopping in that ballroom, you will stop there as a whole person, not an empty one. So, accept the mistakes that have been done unto you and the mistakes that you have done. Accept the fact that you didn't grow up perfectly and you are not perfect now. Accept, embrace, love the people who are given to you to love. And love yourself just as you are. "
14 " [She] discovered what feminism intended to be about, or at least a piece of what it promised to the generations who followed blindly in its wake. The freedom to live one's life apart from any prescribed pathway. The ability to love men and children and jobs but not lose one's self to them. The opportunity to embrace choices rather than just have them. "
15 " In a world where critical thinking skills are almost wholly absent, repetition effectively leapfrogs the cognitive portion of the brain. It helps something get processed as truth. We used to call it unsubstantiated buy-in. Belief without evidence. It only works in a society where thinking for one's self is discouraged. That's how we lost our country. "
16 " Everyone belongs to a society, whether he wishes it or not, whether he chooses it or not, whether he contributes constructively to its development or does the reverse. Community, on the contrary, implies one's relating one's self to others affirmatively and responsibly. Community in the economic sense implies an emphasis on the social values and functions of work. Community in the psychological sense involves the individual's relating himself to others in love as well as creativity. "
― Rollo May , The Meaning of Anxiety
17 " As he lay there, fragments of past states of emotion, fugitive felicities of thought and sensation, rose and floated on the surface of his thoughts. It was one of those moments when the accumulated impressions of life converge on heart and brain, elucidating, enlacing each other, in a mysterious confusion of beauty. He had had glimpses of such a state before, of such mergings of the personal with the general life that one felt one's self a mere wave on the wild stream of being, yet thrilled with a sharper sense of individuality than can be known within the mere bounds of the actual. But now he knew the sensation in its fulness, and with it came the releasing power of language. Words were flashing like brilliant birds through the boughs overhead; he had but to wave his magic wand to have them flutter down to him. Only they were so beautiful up there, weaving their fantastic flights against the blue, that it was pleasanter, for the moment, to watch them and let the wand lie. "
― Edith Wharton , The Custom of the Country
18 " Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one's friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one's self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody - with whom? - with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I? "
― Virginia Woolf , The Waves
19 " I am sensible that to own an inclination for a man is to put one's self wholly in his power "
20 " Does being true to one's self mean offering the literal truth or the truth that should have been, the truth of the image of one's self? It hardly matters by this time. By this time the border between seeing straight on and seeing round the corners of solid objects, between the world as smooth and coherent and the world as dissociated skinless particle, is thoroughly blurred. No longer a case of double vision, but of two separate eyes whose separate visions - what happened and what might have happened - come together in what we call the past, which we see with hindsight. Memory is revision. I have just destroyed another piece of my past, to tell a story. "
― Lynne Sharon Schwartz , Leaving Brooklyn
