4,826 Quotes About Self

For a second I feel a rush of sadness: for the horizons that vanish behind us, for the people we leave behind, the tiny-doll selves that get stored away and ultimately buried.

We're killers, all of us: We kill our lives, our past selves, the things that mattered. We bury them under slogans and excuses.

The kind of society which we still have is maybe, in some cases, getting worse. Competition is becoming a virtue. Intense competition drives people to go more and more into self-interest. Even to see other folks as competition.

It is often easier to justify one's self to others than to respond to the secret doubts that arise in one's own bosom.

I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.

My theory is this: Women falter when they're called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they're called on to enact them.

…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.

One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history.

I do entertain a lot of negative thoughts and I haven't got any self-belief. But I haven't done bad for someone without any self-belief.