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I do think the author ought to be able to give a good reason for the way things are in his poem. Not a bad question to ask oneself.
Sep 10, 2025
All higher humor begins with ceasing to take oneself seriously.
To live is to feel oneself lost.
One must learn to care for oneself first, so that one can then dare to care for someone else.
Art is a way of recognizing oneself.
If one is the master of oneself, one is the resort one can depend on; therefore, one should control oneself of all.
Better to lose oneself in action than to wither in despair.
How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity.
But when all is said, the greatest art is to limit and isolate oneself.
I don't watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.
The quality of one's life is directly related to the quality of questions one asks oneself.
Surrender is to give oneself up to the original cause of one's being.
To live is to be among men, and to be among men is to struggle, a struggle not only with them but with oneself; with their passions, but also with one's own.
Only by taking responsibility for oneself, to the greatest extent possible, can one ever be free, and only a free person can make responsible choices - between right and wrong, saving and spending, giving or taking.
The doctor of the future will be oneself.
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
One can give up many things for love, but one should not give up oneself.
To learn about oneself, a living thing, you have to watch, learn anew each minute.
I'd love to do radio plays. I think that one should be open to everything and shouldn't limit oneself.
It is better to grope in the dark and wade through a million errors to reach the Truth than to entrust oneself to someone who knows not that he knows not. Has a man ever learnt swimming by tying a stone to his neck? So let me go my own way even if it is the wrong one.
It is not about which artist is more skilled than which other artist. It is about creating what is in you to create. A lack of confidence in oneself is like a thief, It steals from the world that which might be worthy.
To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.
Since life is an ever evolving process, one should flow in this process and discover how to actualize and expand oneself.
Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!
Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves, and very frequently by what other people say of them, without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge." -Elinor Dashwood
To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking.
To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking - and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.
I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us.
If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing
Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.
It is only in the giving of ourselves to others that we truly live — only with the meeting of our minds — thine and mine — do we become conscious of the divine spark each of us shares — only in sharing in our daily contacts, one with another, in our mutual hopes and fears do we find real peace. The human contribution is the essential ingredient.
Well used are those cruelties (if it is permitted to speak well of evil) that are carried out in a single stroke, done out of necessity to protect oneself, and are not continued but are instead converted into the greatest possible benefits for the subjects. Badly used are those cruelties which. although being few at the outset, grow with the passing time instead of disappearing. Those who follow the first method can remedy their condition with God and with men; the others cannot possibly survive.
The only history is a mere question of one's struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.
Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice and the exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.
To exist without purpose is to be at the mercy of the chance encounter, the chance invitation, the chance phone call, the chance event- always being controlled by forces external to oneself.
I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process [of] establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.
The evil done by oneself, self-begotten, self-bred, crushes the foolish, as a diamond breaks a precious stone.
One must first learn to live oneself before one blames others.
How to live simply? It is a big question. Let the answer come into the empty space that one must create in oneself. Trying to live simply is not the way - we don't know how. Trying to fix it is filling the space with activity, when what is needed is to empty oneself and allow an answer to appear.
To be true to oneself is the hardest test of life.
One has to devote oneself to a particular pursuit. To be successful at anything, you have to make a total commitment to it.
Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.
One defeats a fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.
One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were . . . . It happened bit by bit, until . . . you're doing exactly what you don't want to do with people you can't stand -- the people you hated when you were ten.
How is it that some celebrities, whom the average person would believe to have all the popularity a human being could want, still admit to feeling lonely? It is quite naive to assume that popularity is the remedy for loneliness. Loneliness does not necessarily equal physical solitude, it is the inability to be oneself and rightfully represented as oneself.
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
How one can live without being able to judge oneself, criticize what one has accomplished, and still enjoy what one does, is unimaginable to me.
If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one’s drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one’s language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.
Learning to live ought to mean learning to die - to acknowledge, to accept, an absolute mortality - without positive outcome,or resurrection, or redemption, for oneself or for anyone else. That has been the old philosophical injunction since Plato: to be a philosopher is to learn how to die.
Belief in oneself is one of the most important bricks in building any successful venture.