Great Throughts Treasury

"The world is governed by love, self-love." -

"To lose one’s self in revery, one must be either very happy or very unhappy. Revery is the child of extreme." -

"I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning." -

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few... When we have no thoughts of self, we are true beginners; and the beginner's mind is boundless and compassionate." -

"It is then certain that compassion is a natural feeling, which, by moderating the violence of love of self in each individual, contributes to the preservation of the whole species." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"Our first duties are to ourselves; our first feelings are centered on self; all our instincts are at first directed to our own preservation and our own welfare. Thus the first notion of justice springs not from what we owe to others, but from what is due to us." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"If thou has not seen the devil, look at thine own self." -

"Any simple act is very, very great if you do it with love and oneness... The greatest art of life is to feel happy by making someone else happy and thereby realize the mystical thread of life. Be fearless, be disciplined, be meditative, and be self-less. That will make you happy and playful." - Shantananda Saraswathi, fully Swami Shantananda Saraswathi, born Chandrashekar

"Self-pity deprives us of the beauty of the past; fear deprives us of the beauty of the future; and jealousy deprives us of the beauty of the moment." - Shantananda Saraswathi, fully Swami Shantananda Saraswathi, born Chandrashekar

"Never allow your sense of self to become associated with your sense of job. If your job vanishes your self doesn’t." - Gordon Van Sauter

"Self-complacency is the companion of ignorance." - Solomon Schecter

"Every individual character is in the right that is in strict consistence with itself. Self-contradiction is the only wrong." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

"The world is moved by self-interest alone." - Friedrich Schiller, fully Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

"The more obligations we accept that are self-imposed, the freer we are." -

"No servitude is more disgraceful than that which is self-imposed." -

"Show me a man who is not a slave. One is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and all men are slaves to fear...no servitude is more disgraceful than that which is self-imposed." -

"There's one blessing only, the source and cornerstone of beatitude - confidence in self." -

"Consideration is not merely a matter of emotional goodwill but of intellectual vigor and moral self-sacrifice. Wisdom must combine with sympathy. That is why consideration underlies the phrase "a scholar and a gentleman," which really sums up the ideal of the output of a college education." - Charles Seymour

"It is the hardest thing in the world to be a good thinker without being a good self examiner." - Lord Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury

"The perfection of virtue is from... long art and management, self-control." - Lord Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury

"Self-expression can be wrong as well as right... When self-expression is identified with irrational surrender to lower instincts, it ends by making the person a slave to those passions. Self-denial is not a renunciation of freedom; it is rather the taming of what is savage and base in our nature for what is higher and better. It is a release from imprisonment by our lusts and passions." - Fulton Sheen, fully Archbishop Fulton John Sheen

"Self-control is promoted by humility. Pride is a fruitful source of uneasiness. It keeps the mind in disquiet. Humility is the antidote to this evil." - Lydia Sigourney, fully Lydia Huntley Sigourney, née Lydia Howard Huntley

"With the gain of knowledge, connect the habit of imparting it. This increases mental wealth by putting it in circulation; and it enhances the value of our knowledge to ourselves, not only in its depth, confirmation and readiness for use, but in that acquaintance with human nature, that self-command, and that reaction of moral training upon ourselves, which are above all price." - Lydia Sigourney, fully Lydia Huntley Sigourney, née Lydia Howard Huntley

"Self-approbation, when founded in truth and a good conscience, is a source of some of the purest joys known to man." - Charles Simmons

"Vanity is so constantly solicitous of self, that even where its own claims are not interested, it indirectly seeks the aliment which it loves by showing how little is deserved by others." - William Gilmore Simms

"The more I can love everything - the trees, the land, the water, my fellow men, women, and children, and myself - the more health I am going to experience and the more of my real self I am going to be." - O. Carl Simonton

"The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigor and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates." - Samuel Smiles

"Every man, like narcissus, becomes enamored of the reflection of himself, only choosing a substance instead of a shadow. This love for any particular woman is self-love at second hand, vanity reflected, compound egotism." - Horace Smith

"Calmness is the rarest quality in human life. It is the moral atmosphere of a life self-reliant and self-controlled. Calmness is absolute confidence and conscious power, ready to be focused in an instant to meet any crisis." -

"Pride is over-estimation of oneself by reason of self-love." -

"Self-denial is the result of a calm, deliberate, invincible attachment to the highest good, flowing forth in the voluntary renunciation of everything inconsistent with the glory of God or the good of our fellow-men." - Gardiner Spring

"It is hardly possible to suspect another without having in one's self the seeds of the baseness the other is accused of." - Stanislaw I, born Stanisław Leszczyński, also spelled Stanislaus NULL

"The great foundation of civil virtue is self-denial." - Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele

"The worst education which teaches self-denial is better than the best which teaches everything else and not that." - John Sterling

"Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self." -

"The desire to serve others is the highest impulse of the human heart and the rewards of such service are beyond measure. If you wish to taste this, then just do it. Just take one step... You will see that the tyranny of self-concern, worry, and trivial pursuits can be released from your life with that single step. It doesn't really matter what you do, it only matters that you do it." - Ganga Stone

"Genius seems to be the faculty of having faith in everything, and especially in one's self." - Arthur Stringer, fully Arthur John Arbuthnott Stringer

"People often say that this or that person has not yet found himself. But the self is not something that one finds. It is something that one creates." -

"Man has a fund of emotional energy which is not all occupied with his self-preservation. This surplus seeks its outlet in the creation of art, for man’s civilization is built upon his surplus." -

"Sectarianism is a perverse form of worldliness in the disguise of religion; it breeds a narrowness of heart in a greater measure than the cult of the world based upon material interest can ever do. For undisguised pursuit of self has its safety in openness, like filth exposed to the sun and air. But the self-magnification with its consequent lessening of God that goes on unchecked under the cover of sectarianism loses its chance of salvation because it defiles the very source of purity." -

"The emancipation of our physical nature is in attaining health, of our social being in attaining goodness, and of our self in attaining love." -

"The higher nature in man always seeks for something which transcends itself and yet is its deepest truth; which claims all its sacrifice, yet makes this sacrifice its own recompense. This is man’s dharma, man’s religion, and man’s self is the vessel which is to carry this sacrifice to the altar." -

"The meaning of our self is not to be found in its separateness from God and others, but in the ceaseless realisation of yoga, of union." -

"When he has the power to see things detached from self-interest and from the insistent claims of the lust of the senses, then alone can he have the true vision of the beauty that is everywhere. Then only can he see that what is unpleasant to us is not necessarily unbeautiful, but has its beauty in truth." -

"When the heat and motion of blind impulses and passions distract it on all sides, we can neither give nor receive anything truly. But when we find our centre in our soul by the power of self-restraint, by the force that harmonises all warring elements and unifies those that are apart, then all our isolated impressions reduce themselves to wisdom, and all our momentary impulses of heart find their completion in love; then all the petty details of our life reveal an infinite purpose, and all our thoughts and deeds unite themselves inseparably in an internal harmony." -

"The life of a person who demands and pursues approval is full of pain and suffering. Even if he does receive a large amount of approval, he will still demand more. We can say with certainty that not everyone will honor him as much as he would like and he will cause himself much self-imposed misery." - Menachem Taryash

"He who gives what he would readily throw away, gives without generosity; for the essence of generosity is in self-sacrifice." - Henry Junior Taylor

"The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It requires citizens to practice the hardest of virtues - self-restraint." -

"The principle of self-interest rightly understood produces no great acts of self-sacrificed, but it suggest daily small acts of self-denial. By itself it cannot suffice to make a man virtuous; but it disciplines a number of person sin habits of regularity, temperance, moderation, foresight, self-command; and if it does not lead men straight to virtue by the will, it gradually draws them in that direction by their habits. If the principle of interest rightly understood were to sway the whole moral world, extraordinary virtues would doubtless be more rare; but I think that gross depravity would then also be less common. The principle of interest rightly understood perhaps prevents men from rising far above the level of mankind, but a great number of other men, who were falling far below it, are caught and restrained by it." -

"The principle of self-interest rightly understood produces no great acts of self-sacrifice, but it suggests daily small acts of self-denial. By itself it cannot suffice to make a an virtuous; but it disciplines a number of persons in habits of regularity, temperance, moderation, foresight, self-command; and, if it does not lead men straight to virtue by the will, it gradually draws them in that direction by their habits. Observe some few individuals, they are lowered by it; survey mankind, it is raised." -