Oneself Quotes

Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.

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.

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.

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.

It is after all the greatest art to limit and isolate oneself.

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.

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.