150 Quotes For Self-Inspiration

In the hustle and bustle of daily life, finding a moment to pause and reflect can be a game-changer. Whether you're seeking motivation for a new endeavor or simply needing a boost to navigate through everyday challenges, the power of a well-timed quote can be transformative. Words have the ability to inspire, to uplift, and to reignite that inner spark we sometimes lose along the way. Our curated collection of the top 150 quotes for self-inspiration aims to provide you with a treasure trove of wisdom and encouragement. Dive in to find the perfect words that resonate with your journey and propel you toward your best self.

1. “We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.” - May Sarton

2. “As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation. The desire he felt, watching Joe, was unquestionably physical, but in the sense that Sammy wanted to inhabit the body of his cousin, not possess it. It was, in part, a longing--common enough among the inventors of heroes--to be someone else; to be more than the result of two hundred regimens and scenarios and self-improvement campaigns that always ran afoul of his perennial inability to locate an actual self to be improved. Joe Kavalier had an air of competence, of faith in his own abilities, that Sammy, by means of constant effort over the whole of his life, had finally learned only to fake. ” - Michael Chabon

3. “Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It *is*--is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement.To be nothing in the self-effacement of humility, yet, for the sake of the task, to embody its whole weight and importance in your earing, as the one who has been called to undertake it. To give to people, works, poetry, art, what the self can contribute, and to take, simply and freely, what belongs to it by reason of its identity. Praise and blame, the winds of success and adversity, blow over such a life without leaving a trace or upsetting its balance.” - Dag Hammarskjöld

4. “To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place.In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.” - Dag Hammarskjöld

5. “For it is probable that when people talk aloud, the selves (of which there may be more than two thousand) are conscious of disserverment, and are trying to communicate but when communication is established there is nothing more to be said.” - Virginia Woolf

6. “A friend is a gift you give yourself.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

7. “We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers - but never blame yourself. It's never your fault. But it's always your fault, because if you wanted to change you're the one who has got to change.” - Katharine Hepburn

8. “LOVE of others is the appreciation of one's self. MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.” - Mina Loy

9. “Was everyone else really as alive as she was?... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance.” - Ian McEwan

10. “Wherever you go, there you are.” - Thomas A. Kempis

11. “Gaze into the fire, into the clouds, and as soon as the inner voices begin to speak... surrender to them. Don't ask first whether it's permitted, or would please your teachers or father or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that.” - Hermann Hesse

12. “The woman I was yesterday, introduced me to the woman I am today; which makes me very excited about meeting the woman I will become tomorrow. ” - Poetic Evolution

13. “I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.” - Jorge Luis Borges

14. “In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.” - Oscar Wilde

15. “You don't know how to talk to people you don't like. Don't love, really. You can't live in the world with such strong likes and dislikes.” - J.D. Salinger

16. “For it is in your power to retire into yourself whenever you choose.” - Marcus Aurelius

17. “In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.” - Henry David Thoreau

18. “Sometimes I think that wisdoms slip from my mind like drool from the lips of an idiot...Where's all this stuff coming from? Is it any good? Any good in, you know, the wisdom sense? Who am I to spout this stuff anyway?Well, here's the thing. You too can find yourself shedding wisdom like cat hair if you only allow yourself the liberty of introspection.Think about what you alone know that no one else does. That one neat wonderful profound insight. It is fully yours. No one else on this planet of about six billion people understands it like you do.Now, see if you can share it with someone. Bestow it, a gift of yourself.Wisdom is like gossip. Except it's the good kind.” - Vera Nazarian

19. “Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.” - George Eliot

20. “One hand was behind his back, and he held it out, presenting a bouquet of white and smoky purple lilies. “They’re straight from the underworld, by the way. They are everlasting. They won’t die.” - Jess C. Scott

21. “[novan]: bassists are very good with their fingers[novan]: and some of us sing backup vocals, so that means we're good with our mouths too...(~ IM chat with Novan Chang, 18, bassist)” - Jess C. Scott

22. “I've triedto become someone else for a while,only to discover that he, too, was me.” - Stephen Dunn

23. “We always see the worst in our selves. Our most volnerable selves. We need someone to get close enough to tell us that we're wrong. Someone we trust.” - Rachel Cohn

24. “True emptiness is not empty, but contains all things. The mysterious and pregnant void creates and reflects all possibilities. From it arises our individuality, which can be discovered and developed, although never possessed or fixed.” - Jack Kornfield

25. “Don't try to tell me what I am because I know what I am not” - Dr. Amit Abraham

26. “A fine glass vase goes from treasure to trash, the moment it is broken. Fortunately, something else happens to you and me. Pick up your pieces. Then, help me gather mine.” - Vera Nazarian

27. “We all have bad things inside us, and we all choose either to give in to those bad things or to fight them.” - Kristin Cast

28. “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else's life. But this notion gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me.” - Charles Taylor

29. “[M]y discovering my own identity doesn't mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue, partly overt, partly internal, with others.” - Charles Taylor

30. “To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.” - Charles Taylor

31. “In my experience, self-hatred is the dominant malaise crippling Christians and stifling their growth in the Holy Spirit.” - Brennan Manning

32. “There can only be two basic loves... the love of God unto the forgetfulness of self, or the love of self unto the forgetfulness and denial of God.” - St. Augustine

33. “Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.” - Brennan Manning

34. “Stop in somebody's shadow to rest and cool down, and you are lost. No one can make anyone else happy.” - Peter Deunov

35. “I feel the need to endanger myself every so often.” - Tim Daly

36. “My life is one long obstacle course with me as the chief obstacle.” - Jack Parr

37. “There's something liberating about not pretending. Dare to embarrass yourself. Risk.” - Drew Barrymore

38. “There comes a time when all that remains for us to do is to surrender to the idiosyncrasies of our nature.” - Floriano Martins

39. “Though the 'Thou' is not an 'It', it is also not "another 'I'". He who treats a person as "another 'I'" does not really see that person but only a projected image of himself. Such a relation, despite the warmest "personal" feeling is really 'I'-'It'.” - Mauric Friedman

40. “Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune. ” - Carl Gustav Jung

41. “Your duty is to be and not to be this or that. 'I am that I am' sums up the whole truth. The method is summed up in the words 'Be still'. What does stillness mean? It means destroy yourself. Because any form or shape is the cause for trouble. Give up the notion that 'I am so and so'. All that is required to realize the Self is to be still. What can be easier than that?” - Ramana Maharshi

42. “I like to reinvent myself — it’s part of my job.” - Karl Lagerfeld

43. “To deal with things knowledge of things is needed. To deal withpeople, you need insight, sympathy. To deal with yourself, you neednothing. Be what you are--conscious being--and don't stray away fromyourself.” - Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

44. “To be me is to be different...” - Robert Fanney

45. “No aacomplishments are important than self realization of self satisfaction.” - Santosh Kalwar

46. “This was all of it, no doubt, the strange passing feeling that had come to me in the boat. Age. Vanity. The impossibility of accepting the new versions of oneself that life kept offering. The impossibility of the old version’s vanishing.” - Sue Miller

47. “In still moments by the sea life seems large-drawn and simple. It is there we can see into ourselves.” - Rolf Edberg

48. “Not too long ago thousands spent their lives as recluses to find spiritual vision in the solitude of nature. Modern man need not become a hermit to achieve this goal, for it is neither ecstasy nor world-estranged mysticism his era demands, but a balance between quantitative and qualitative reality. Modern man, with his reduced capacity for intuitive perception, is unlikely to benefit from the contemplative life of a hermit in the wilderness. But what he can do is to give undivided attention, at times, to a natural phenomenon, observing it in detail, and recalling all the scientific facts about it he may remember. Gradually, however, he must silence his thoughts and, for moments at least, forget all his personal cares and desires, until nothing remains in his soul but awe for the miracle before him. Such efforts are like journeys beyond the boundaries of narrow self-love and, although the process of intuitive awakening is laborious and slow, its rewards are noticeable from the very first. If pursued through the course of years, something will begin to stir in the human soul, a sense of kinship with the forces of life consciousness which rule the world of plants and animals, and with the powers which determine the laws of matter. While analytical intellect may well be called the most precious fruit of the Modern Age, it must not be allowed to rule supreme in matters of cognition. If science is to bring happiness and real progress to the world, it needs the warmth of man's heart just as much as the cold inquisitiveness of his brain.” - Franz Winkler

49. “So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself.” - Alan Wilson Watts

50. “But even them, my pains, I understand ill. That must come from my not being all pain and nothing else. There's the rub. Then they recede, or I, till they fill me with amaze and wonder, seen from a better planet. Not often, but I ask no more. Catch-cony life! To be nothing but pain, how that would simplify matters! Omnidolent! Impious dream.” - Samuel Beckett

51. “Certainly, if he still has himself, a man of understanding has lost nothing.” - Michel de Montaigne

52. “The erotic state – again, a mixture of concentration and spontaneity – is a hypnoidal state, probably the most powerful kind that we are capable of experiencing, and it is in this condition that unexpected regions of the self are revealed, as the majority of people know from experience.” - Peter Redgrove

53. “Some care is needed in using Descartes' argument. "I think, therefore I am" says rather more than is strictly certain. It might seem as though we are quite sure of being the same person to-day as we were yesterday, and this is no doubt true in some sense. But the real Self is as hard to arrive at as the real table, and does not seem to have that absolute, convincing certainty that belongs to particular experiences.” - Bertrand Russell

54. “There are days when that dark face is something I can think of as a friend – a primal energy that carries me forward when nothing else will – but more often than not I am face-to-face with a stranger, a companion to something I recognise as myself, sure enough, but one who knows more than I do, thinks less of danger and propriety than I ever have or will, feels a cool and amused contempt for the rules and rituals by which I live, the duties I too readily accept, the compromises I too willingly allow (p. 262)” - John Burnside

55. “It is when you lose sight of yourself, that you lose your way. To keep your truth in sight you must keep yourself in sight and the world to you should be a mirror to reflect to you your image; the world should be a mirror that you reflect upon.” - C. JoyBell C.

56. “What we have not had to decipher, to elucidate by our own efforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.” - Marcel Proust

57. “For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary – or perhaps more like mediocre – level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.” - Haruki Murakami

58. “O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all - what is it?” - Julian Jaynes

59. “Poor Father, I see his final exploration. He arrives at the new place, his hair risen in astonishment, his mouth and eyes dumb. His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his arms spread in pantomimic celebration, the immigrant, as in every moment of his life, arriving eternally on the shore of his Self.” - E.L. Doctorow

60. “Why is erasing desire seen as so important? If the subjugation of the self is the point of the self what's the point in having a self? It's like someone handing you a leaflet which says throw this leaflet away.” - Tibor Fischer

61. “V-Day…if you need this one day in a year to show everyone else you truly care for “your loved one” I think it’s quite stupid. I hate this commercialism. It’s all artificial, and has nothing to do with real love.” - Jess C. Scott

62. “The source of wisdom and power, of love and beauty, is within ourselves, but not within our egos. It is within our consciousness. Indeed, its presence provides us with a conscious contrast which enables us to speak of the ego as if it were something different and apart: it is the true Self whereas the ego is only an illusion of the mind.” - Paul Brunton

63. “Henry: I usen't to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished any of them, I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever. (Pause.)” - Samuel Beckett

64. “He sat thus, lost in meditation, thinking Om, his soul as the arrow directed at Brahman.” - Hermann Hesse

65. “We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.” - Iris Murdoch

66. “I suppose it had something to do with it being a secret, just how much it had meant to me. Maybe all of us at Hailsham had little secrets like that--little private nooks created out of thin air where we could go off alone with our fears and longings. But the very fact that we had such needs would have felt wrong to us at the time--like somehow we were letting the side down.” - Kazuo Ishiguro

67. “He had lived and acted on the assumption that he was alone, and now he saw that he had not been. What he had done made others suffer. No matter how much he would long for them to forget him, they would not be able to. His family was a part of him, not only in blood, but in spirit.” - richard wright

68. “Self-will and prayer are both ways of getting things done. At the center of self-will is me, carving a world in my image, but at the center of prayer is God, carving me in his Son's image.” - Paul E. Miller

69. “Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find until after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others do the same.” - C.S. Lewis

70. “One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?” - Alain De Botton

71. “As long as a self is driven by an id to a Thou, it is not a matter of love, either. In love the self is not driven by the id, but rather the self chooses the Thou.” - Viktor E. Frankl

72. “Aku bukan Wahib. Aku adalah me-wahib. Aku mencari, dan terus menerus mencari, menuju dan menjadi Wahib. Ya, aku bukan aku. Aku adalah meng-aku, yang terus menerus berproses menjadi aku.” - Ahmad Wahib

73. “A crucial element of the real self is its unconditional acceptance of itself.” - Michael Adzema

74. “Rulers are not anointed. They are created by the void of self-mastery.” - T.F. Hodge

75. “Your life experience is a moving picture, of which you are writer, director, performer, producer and critic.” - T.F. Hodge

76. “Behold I do not give lectures or a little charity, when I give I give myself.” - Walt Whitman

77. “Who you are is always right.” - DENG MING-DAO

78. “All matters being spiritual; man or woman can only find peace when peace is realized from within.” - T.F. Hodge

79. “Most of the tools from medieval times were extensions of the physical self. Tools are now extensions of the mental self.” - Lotoya Peterson

80. “Great mysteries inhabit the threshold of my being.” - Fernando Pessoa

81. “As long as you can find yourself, you’ll never starve.” - Suzanne Collins

82. “To run with the wolf was to run in the shadows, the dark ray of life, survival and instinct. A fierceness that was both proud and lonely, a tearing, a howling, a hunger and thirst. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst. A strength that would die fighting, kicking, screaming, that wouldn't stop until the last breath had been wrung from its body. The will to take one's place in the world. To say 'I am here.' To say 'I am.” - O. R. Melling

83. “It is a joy to be hidden, and disaster not to be found.” - D.W. Winnicott

84. “We are spiritual children of God the Father. We preach it. We sing it. But do we really understand it? Sometimes it’s easy to tell others they are loved, but not so easy to believe it of ourselves — not because we don’t think God loves His children, but because we may feel undeserving of His love. The adversary loves to remind us who we are not. Not pretty. Not smart. Not strong. But God would not have sacrificed His Son to save us if we aren’t worth saving.” - Toni Sorenson

85. “You can only get outside yourself by looking inside.” - Tonya Hurley

86. “I am afraid of darkness... even though it knows me it loves me.” - Ray Fawkes

87. “Don't think about making life better for other people who don't even deserve you, rather, focus on making your life the best, for yourself and those who love you.” - C. JoyBell C.

88. “When you're rotten about yourself, you become rotten to everyone else, even thoseyou love.” - Mitch Albom

89. “What makes us leave what we love best?What is it inside us that keeps erasing itselfWhen we need it most,That sends us into uncertainty for its own sakeAnd holds us flush there until we begin to love itAnd have to begin again?What is it within our own lives we decline to liveWhenever we find it, making our days unendurable,And nights almost visionless?I still don't know yet, but I do it.” - Charles Wright

90. “[T]he Enneagram is, at its most abstract, a universal mandala of the self—a symbol of each of us.” - Don Richard Riso

91. “It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.” - Jack Kerouac

92. “Your inner strength is your outer foundation” - Allan Rufus

93. “It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.” - Herman Hesse

94. “Each of us is several, is man, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways.” - Pascal Mercier

95. “For everyone now strives most of all to seperate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life, but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

96. “If you want to find the real competition, just look in the mirror. After awhile you'll see your rivals scrambling for second place.” - Criss Jami

97. “I stop fighting my inner demons. We're on the same side now. T-shirt” - Darynda Jones

98. “We must not be anything other than what we are.” - Maaza Mengiste

99. “Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?” - Oscar Wilde

100. “I often think of the image only I can see now, and of which I’ve never spoken. It’s always there, in the same silence, amazing. It’s the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight” - Marguerite Duras

101. “Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment.” - Alan Wilson Watts

102. “But now the other half of "us" was gone and, lying there in my shadowy room, I'd be struck with this realization that I had no clue how to be just me again.” - Jennifer Brown

103. “When all the teachers are gone, who will be your teacher?The student replied: “Everything!Kobun, paused, then said: “No, you".” - Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi

104. “Sometimes our Biggest Nightmare turns out to be our Biggest Gift. And it all comes down to our attitude. Life will throw us curve balls and disappointments, even heartbreak. But ultimately we can choose if we're going to be Bitter or Better for the experience.” - Kathryn Orford

105. “I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!” - Nathaniel Hawthorne

106. “Badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.” - Anthony Burgess

107. “Change from the inside out involves a steadfast gaze upon our Lord that's life changing because it reflects a deep turning from a commitment to self-sufficiency. Without repentance, a look at Christ provides only the illusion of comfort.” - Larry Crabb

108. “I? This is the very root of all evil.” - H.M. Forester

109. “Not in the clamor of the crowded street,Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng,But in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

110. “It isn't until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are - not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit within - that you can begin to take control.” - Oprah Winfrey

111. “I am... me. No matter what I say or do, I'm still me. That 's what Satozuki told me once. The things I feel, the things I do... Being a vampire, Being a man, being betrayed by my mother... when all those things come together, they make up "me." But none of these things taken separately. I'm just me.” - Ohmi Tomu

112. “An apology given just to appease one's conscience is self-serving and better left unspoken!” - Evinda Lepins

113. “We never know how high we areTill we are called to rise;And then, if we are true to plan,Our statures touch the skies.The heroism we reciteWould be a daily thing,Did not ourselves the cubits warpFor fear to be a king.” - Emily Dickinson

114. “What would you say to yourself if you could actually meet a younger you?” - Doug Dillon

115. “But, it’s not what they think of you that matters, it’s what you think of yourself. If I’d said something mean to them, I wouldn't like myself very much.” - M. Latimer-Ridley

116. “Words are God’s gift to mend a broken soul.” - Chimnese Davids

117. “There is only one you. Stop trying to devalue yourself by trying to be a copy of someone else.” - Susie Clevenger

118. “You're a Genius all the time” - Jack Kerouac

119. “..Imam Ali [A]..'However knows himself (his soul or spirit) knows [or has known] his Lord” - DR MUHAMMAD ALI SHOMALI

120. “The finer natures were those that shone at the larger times.” - Henry James

121. “On my fifteenth birthday, I came to realize that the expression spoiled rotten meant exactly that. We kids were the apples of our parents' eyes, and I, for one, was rotting from inside out.” - Neal Shusterman

122. “Suffering builds character and impels you to penetrate life’s secrets. It’s the path of great artists, great religious leaders, great social reformers. The problem is not suffering per se, but rather our identification with our own ego: our divided, dualistic, cramped view of things. ‘We are too ego-centered,’ Suzuki tells Cage.’ The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow. We seem to carry it all the time from childhood up to the time we finally pass away.” - Kay Larson

123. “Depression is not generalized pessimism, but pessimism specific to the effects of one's own skilled action.” - Robert M. Sapolsky

124. “It's what's buried deep inside that frightens me because it's broken, like a shattered mirror.” - Jessica Sorensen

125. “What about you and me, Adina?” Duff said, sidling up to her by the railing. “I know I screwed up. But do you think we could start over?”Adina thought about everything that had happened. Part of her wanted to kiss Duff McAvoy, the tortured British trust-fund-runaway-turned-pirate-of-necessity who loved rock ‘n’ roll and mouthy-but-vulnerable bass-playing girls from New Hampshire. But he didn’t exist. Not really. He was a creature of TV and her imagination, a guy she’d invented as much as he’d invented himself. And this was what she suddenly understood about her mother: how with each man, each husband, she was really trying to fill in the sketchy parts of herself and become somebody she could finally love. It was hard to live in the messiness and easier to believe in the dream. And in that moment, Adina knew she was not her mother after all. She would make mistakes, but they wouldn’t be the same mistakes. Starting now.“Sorry,” she said, heading for the bow, where a spot of sun looked inviting. ”Oh, also, about that blog? Just so you know, my dads know a lot of gay lawyers. Bitches will take your ass down if you try to publish that. Peace out.” - Libba Bray

126. “I simply love being me. You have no power to control my feelings because I own my own heart” - che acebido

127. “To be enlightened is to know oneself and not run away.” - Veronique Vienne

128. “We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

129. “Byron: The luxuries of this place have made me soft.The metal point's gone from my pen, there's nothing left but the feather.Gutman:That may be true.But what can you do about it?Byron:Make a departure.Gutman:From yourself?Byron:From my present self to myself as I used to be!Gutman:That's the furthest departure a man could make!” - Tenesse Williams

130. “What an idiot I'd been. What a spoilt brat. What a bloody fool.” - David Millar

131. “...people demonize certain types of crime - it's a way of distancing ourselves from the monsters...” - John Geddes

132. “...to know an other's interior life you are his confessor or a writer - the one is admitted freely, the other intrudes by discerning of spirits ” - John Geddes

133. “I'd rather strive for the kind of interview where instead of me asking to introduce myself to society, society asks me to introduce myself to society.” - Criss Jami

134. “A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.” - Madeleine L'Engle

135. “You speak as if this is a good world with a little evil in it. Rubbish. It's a hellish one where the best a man can do is put a little sanity back and look after his own.” - A.J. Hartley and David Hewson

136. “As I, my real self, grew older, I entered more and more into the substance of my dreams. One may dream, and even in the midst of the dream be aware that he is dreaming, and if the dream be bad, comfort himself with the thought that it is only a dream. This is a common experience with all of us. And so it was that I, the modern, often entered into my dreaming, and in the consequent strange dual personality was both actor and spectator. And right often have I, the modern, been perturbed and vexed by the foolishness, illogic, obtuseness, and general all-round stupendous stupidity of myself, the primitive.” - Jack London

137. “Give yourself something to work toward -- constantly.” - Mary Kay Ash

138. “There are many going afar to marvel at the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the long courses of great rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the movements of the stars, yet they leave themselves unnoticed!” - Saint Augustine

139. “I figure the more people think I'm just mildly weird, the less likely they are to know how weird I really am.” - Melanie Hooyenga

140. “The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant tales, fascinated. It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self, and leaves fall at the feet of the Self for a reason, and people are watching. A mind risks real ignorance for the sometimes paltry prize of an imagination enriched. The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world—if only from time to time.” - Annie Dillard

141. “Do not compare yourself with anybody. Compare yourself with yourself, for yourself and by yourself. We are all uniquely pottered and purposed by our creator!” - Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

142. “Cultivate the understanding that the self is not really an independently existing entity, and begin to view self instead in terms of it's dependent relation to others. Although it is difficult to say that merely reflecting on this will produce a profound spiritual realization, it will at least have some effect. Your mind will be more open. Something will begin to change within you. Therefore, even in the immediate term there is definitely a positive and beneficial effect in reversing these two attitudes and moving from self-centeredness to other-centeredness, from belief in self existence to belief in dependent origination.” - His Holiness the Dalai Lama

143. “Like the appearance of silver in mother of pearl, the world seems real until the Self, the underlying reality, is realized.” - Shankara

144. “There is no shame in having been the woman I was. She made me the woman I am.” - Julie-Anne

145. “The you that you think of as you (and that thinks of you as you, and so on) is not you, it’s just the character that the underlying truth of you is dreaming into existence. Enlightenment isn’t in the character, it’s in the underlying truth.” - Jed McKenna

146. “I'm persnickety," I confessed. "Not, incidentally, to the point of being snarly. But still. Delightful and persnickety are not a common blend." "Do you want to know why I never married?" "The question wasn't at the top of my list," I admitted. The old woman made me meet her eye. "Listen to me; I never married because I was easily bored. It's an awful, self-defeating trait to have. It is much better to be too easily interested.” - David Levithan

147. “Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way. I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals until, by that September when Father went down the river, the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.” - Annie Dillard

148. “Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you.” - Masamune Shirow

149. “When I said, “I am my mother, but I’m not,” I was saying my path would be my own.” - Terry Tempest Williams

150. “The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you've never even thought of. And you're stuck with you're past when you're stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.” - Joseph Campbell