Oneself Quotes

Testing oneself is best when done alone.

Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.

One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds.

In order to remain true to oneself one ought to renounce one's party three times a day.

To forget oneself is to be happy.

One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love - any love - reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.

One never comes into embarrassment, if one is ready to balance. To ask oneself never in embarrassment, what have you in these decades made.

The Southern whites are in many respects a great people. Looked at from a certain point of view, they are picturesque. If one will put oneself in a romantic frame of mind, one can admire their notions of chivalry and bravery and justice.

In France one must adapt oneself to the fragrance of a urinal.

To know oneself is to disbelieve utopia.

I think it's important for one to take a certain distance from oneself.

The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.

Most of one's life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke - and that the joke is oneself.

If one is reported as having set up camp overseas, it's as if one has made oneself unavailable.

Derive happiness in oneself from a good day's work, from illuminating the fog that surrounds us.

To think the world therefore a general Bedlam, or place of madmen, and oneself a physician, is the most necessary point of present wisdom: an important imagination, and the way to happiness.

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division; and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts.

Not to like ice cream is to show oneself uninterested in food.

I can only say that one's individual situation is more real and important to oneself than the devastations of fates and empires especially when they do not vitally affect oneself.

To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.

One's own religion is after all a matter between oneself and one's Maker and no one else's.

I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

One could look over the past century and ask oneself, has the increased longevity been good, bad or indifferent?

What a powerful thing to know: That one's own desires are mappable onto strangers; that what one finds in oneself will most certainly be found in The Other.

Coming out is a means of redefining oneself, of claiming membership in a lifestyle and a social order with distinct values. Chief among these values is honesty.

A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke - and that the joke is oneself.

To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.