98 quotes about oneself follow in order of popularity. Be sure to bookmark and share your favorites!

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.

Soren Kierkegaard

Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.

Carl Jung

Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right - especially when one is right.

Friedrich Nietzsche

One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself.

Oscar Wilde

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.

Oscar Wilde

When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.

Oscar Wilde

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

Oscar Wilde

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

Michel de Montaigne

Love is, above all else, the gift of oneself.

Jean Anouilh

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

Aldous Huxley

The most onerous slavery is to be a slave to oneself.

Seneca

To be proud of virtue is to poison oneself with the antidote.

Benjamin Franklin

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

Henri Bergson

There is no greater joy than of feeling oneself a creator. The triumph of life is expressed by creation.

Henri Bergson

One must know oneself, if this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

Blaise Pascal

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

Clifton Fadiman

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

Henri Matisse

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Iris Murdoch

It's like finding oneself amongst friends. People look at you as if they like you. That is, until they actually get to know you.

Hayley Mills

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.

Carl Gustav Jung

The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable.

Paul Tillich

To think at its best is to find oneself carried down the current of necessity.

Brand Blanshard

An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.

Konrad Adenauer

True greatness consists in the use of a powerful understanding to enlighten oneself and others.

Voltaire

I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.

Marlene Dietrich

Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.

Gao Xingjian

To establish oneself in the world, one has to do all one can to appear established.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

It is in spending oneself that one becomes rich.

Sarah Bernhardt

Envy is an insult to oneself.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Self-respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.

Abraham J. Heschel

I should die any day now. I came here to die. But I want to leave behind my art. Art is the expression of oneself.

Donald Long

Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary's life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.

Angela Davis

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Iris Murdoch

It's not by amusing oneself that one learns.

Anatole France

It is a sign of a dull nature to occupy oneself deeply in matters that concern the body; for instance, to be over much occupied about exercise, about eating and drinking, about easing oneself, about sexual intercourse.

David Bailey

Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

There is only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best.

Doris Lessing

The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable.

Paul Tillich

Questions are a burden to others; answers are a prison for oneself.

Patrick Mcgoohan

To succeed is nothing, it's an accident. but to feel no doubts about oneself is something very different: it is character.

Marie Leneru

I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.

Walker Percy

Whether one calls oneself conservative or revolutionary, whether one composers in a conventional or progressive manner, whether one tries to imitate old styles or is destined to express new ideas - one must be convinced of the infallibility of one's own fantasy and one must believe in one's own inspiration.

Arnold Schoenberg

It's hard to express oneself at times like this.

Malcolm Beattie

. . . life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis.

William Empson

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

Simone Weil

PITIFUL, adj. The state of an enemy of opponent after an imaginary encounter with oneself.

Ambrose Bierce

Belonging to oneself--the whole essence of life lies in that.

Ivan Turgenev

One is called a criminal for being different, and malicious for observing other people with too much clarity and penetration. But what if one began with oneself?

Andre Suares

It is so comic to hear oneself called old, even at ninety I suppose!

Alice James

Finding oneself was a misnomer; a self is not found but made.

Jacques Barzun

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim.

Graham Greene

I don't watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

Stephen Fry

Nothing is more difficult and nothing requires more character than to find oneself in open opposition to one's time (and those one loves) and to say loudly: No!

Kurt Tucholsky

Tearing oneself apart for the amusement of the audience.

Sean Penn

The contemplative life is often miserable. One must act more, think less, and not watch oneself live.

Nicholas Chamfort

Why not be oneself? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?

Dame Edith Sitwell

Any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you.

Carlos Casteneda

Anything done for another is done for oneself.

Pope John Paul Ii

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Graham Greene

It is noble to teach oneself, it is still nobler to teach others.

Mark Twain

Life at any time can become difficult: life at any time can become easy. It all depends upon how one adjusts oneself to life.

Morarji Desai

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

Gustave Flaubert

The greatest delight is to mark one's enemy, prepare everything, avenge oneself thoroughly, and then go to sleep.

Joseph Stalin

To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.

Walter Benjamin

The business of life is to enjoy oneself; everything else is a mockery.

George Norman Douglas

RIBALDRY, n. Censorious language by another concerning oneself.

Ambrose Bierce

I learned that one has to be really focused and devote oneself if you're going to get into the animal world. It's a full-time occupation. I didn't get into that. My mother immersed herself with animals. But she didn't forget people, either.

Alice Gilborn

Our culture is about distraction, numbing oneself. There is no self-reflection, no sitting still. It's absolutely exhausting.

David Greenfield

Friendship with oneself is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.

Eleanor Roosevelt

The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

Marcus Aurelius

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

Charles Baudelaire

The one sure way to conciliate a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.

Konrad Adenauer

It is necessary to try to surpass oneself always; this occupation ought to last as long as life.

Queen Christina

As all of you know, and I believe Channel 4 reported, it is very expensive to defend oneself when the federal government investigates you.

Mark Rush

Being able to support oneself allows one to choose a marriage out of love and not just economic dependence. It also allows one to risk that marriage.

Gloria Steinem

There is only one way to win hearts and that is to make oneself like unto those of whom one would be loved.

W. Somerset Maugham

One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.

Loren Eiseley

Employ oneself upon trifling professional matters which others could do.

James Wyatt

Life engenders life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.

Sarah Bernhardt

There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.

Guy Debord

To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom.

Andre Gide

To understand is to forgive, even oneself.

Alexander Chase

To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.

Bruce Lee

To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals -- and critics of the Women's Movement.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Belief in oneself is one of the most important bricks in building any successful venture.

Lydia M. Child

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

Kitty O'neill Collins

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.

Jessamyn West

What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.

Archibald Macleish

To deny oneself is to be aware only of Christ and no more of self, to see only Him who goes before and no more the road which is too hard for us.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the oneself that there is no self left to die.

Bernard Berenson

Love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.

Erich Fromm

To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.

Erich Fromm

It is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph.

Robert Frank

It's not till sex has died out between a man and a woman that they can really love. And now I mean affection. Now I mean to be fond of (as one is fond of oneself) --to hope, to be disappointed, to live inside the other heart.

Enid Bagnold

The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.

Eldridge Cleaver

What comes from oneself, is nearly from no one... There is only me as a link.

Eduardo Chillida