If you can look at yourself without condemning what you see, without comparing yourself with somebody else, without wishing to be more beautiful or more virtuous; if you can just observe what you are and move with it, then you will find that it is possible to go infinitely far. Then there is no end to the journey, and that is the mystery, the beauty of it.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti in Think on These Things
How many people long for that “past, simpler, and better world,” I wonder, without ever recognizing the truth that perhaps it was they who were simpler and better, and not the world about them?
—R.A. Salvatore
It’s as though we have two selves or two natures or two wills with two contrary viewpoints.… Your lower self sees you as the center of the universe—your higher self sees you as a cell in the body of humanity.
—Peace Pilgrim
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
—Cyril Connolly
In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
—Frank Zappa
Happiness grows at our own firesides, and is not to be picked in strangers' gardens.
—Douglas William Jerrold
I have had more trouble with myself than with any other man.
—Dwight L. Moody
It is my opinion that humans are largely what they make of themselves; in other words, "human nature" is not so much an empirical reality as a process of self-construction. This means that if people become what they think they are, what they think they are is exceedingly important.
—Linda Marie Fedigan
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
—Hermann Hesse
To know one's self is wisdom, but not to know one's neighbors is genius.
—Minna Antrim
What we cultivate and care about inwardly either freshens or poisons the bloodstream of humanity.
—Robert Corin Morris
A kleptomaniac is a person who helps himself because he can't help himself.
—Henry Morgan
Our ideals are our better selves.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
—Leo Tolstoy