Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.
—Eleanor Roosevelt
The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.
—William Hazlitt
Laughing at our mistakes can lengthen our own life. Laughing at someone else's can shorten it.
—Cullen Hightower
We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.
—Anaïs Nin
Dream is not a revelation. If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes, lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream—a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows—is essentially poetry.
—Michel Leiris
Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves.
—Rudyard Kipling
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
—Paul Valéry
Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.
—Charles Simic
It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.
—Jean Baudrillard
It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell.
—Gautama Buddha
Our first and last love is self-love.
—Christian Nestell Bovee
Defy your own group. Rebel against yourself.
—Cathy Guisewite
Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.
—Michel de Montaigne
I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.
—Roy Lichtenstein
Happiness depends upon ourselves.
—Aristotle