Quotes About Being Self Made

“The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death).”

— George Steiner

“It's intriguing to observe so many of the outrageous prophecies, made with such biting satire years ago in the first edition, come into being through the craft of so many self-entitled egomaniacs running a global 'corpornation' for personal interest and professional profit. I had no idea then, as I now know, that I was writing with so much understatement. Honest outrage and political satire are two of the most important weapons that we have to protect infringement against our personal freedoms through oligarchy and to maintain any semblance of humanity in our democracy as our government aggressively privatizes and over-reaches at the expense of those millions whom it has sworn so dishonestly to serve and has utterly abandoned.”

— David B. Lentz

“Tattooing, when understood in its entirety, must be seen as a religious act. The human being brings forth images from the center of the self and communicates them to the world. Fantasy is embodied in reality and the person is made whole.”

— Spider Webb

“The problem with romance is the occlusion. The tunnel vision, drawing your every gaze downstream, into those other eyes, the flotsam of your better self, your clearer self, along for the ride. It doesn't matter what secrets swirl and bob in the waters beneath you, as you float toward that lady at Delphi, who, you imagined, reading Mythology, must have been beautiful. It doesn't matter that Charybdis, with no body, with no form, with only a mouth-as-being, couldn't have been evil, because she lacked the brain for it. It doesn't matter that following the logical course of events, the natural course, always disadvantages someone else, because love, after all, is simply a competition for resources, made infinitely complex and unknowable when squared and cubed and raised to every other emotional exponent - and then layered with sex and society and a bad memory for what those resources were in the first place.”

— Darin Bradley

“We all had our secrets, and maybe the most terrible of them was that we weren't exactly who we thought we were, who we said we were, who we dreamed of being, that we were divided and at war and half made of self-mythologies, too. Sometimes on that staircase spiraling up from the darkness, we met ourselves coming up into the light, not recognizing ourselves or what we might do next.”

— Michael Paterniti

“That all pretensions to being self-made hide the reciprocal truth, that we have unpayable debts to the world around us, to our community, to our forebears, to the ancients, to nature, to the gods.”

— Lewis Hyde

“Being idolized and being torn down felt oddly similar. They both made me feel alone.
Friendship and trust should be earned, and when you're famous, people seem to want to give them to you whether you've earned them or not, and it felt dishonest to me. Fame was not real. It was all a projection-fame made me a blank canvas that people projected their love, lust, troubles, self-worth, and desire upon.
Fame and power do not change us, they amplify us.”

— Jewel

“Men can, of course, be stirred into life by being dressed up in uniforms and made to blare out chants of war. It must be confessed that this is one way for men to break bread with comrades and to find what they are seeking, which is a sense of something universal, of self-fulfillment. But of this bread men die.”

— Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

“Definitely that kind of owner, he thought. Self-made man proud of his handiwork. Confuses bluffness and honesty with merely being rude. I wouldn't mind betting a dollar that he thinks he can tell a man's character by testing the firmness of his handshake and looking deeply into his eyes.”

— Terry Pratchett

“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim "You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself" made clear sense. And I add, "Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.”

— Bell Hooks

“Being a parent has taught me a lot of things already, you know, though it's only been a year and half, and has made me address parts of myself that I would otherwise live in comfortable denial of, or you know and - you know, for instance, my self-loathing.”

— Ani DiFranco

“Contemplating the goodness within ourselves is a classical meditation, done to bring light, joy, and rapture to the mind. In contemporary times this practice might be considered rather embarrassing, because so often the emphasis is on all the unfortunate things we have done, all the disturbing mistakes we have made. Yet this classical reflection is not a way of increasing conceit. It is rather a commitment to our own happiness, seeing our happiness as the basis for intimacy with all of life. It fills us with joy and love for ourselves and a great deal of self-respect. Significantly, when we do metta practice, we begin by directing metta toward ourselves. This is the essential foundation for being able to offer genuine love to others”

— Sharon Salzberg

“Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.”

— George Eliot

“The moment men begin to care more for education than for religion they begin to care more for ambition than for education. It is no longer a world in which the souls of all are equal before heaven, but a world in which the mind of each is bent on achieving unequal advantage over the other. There begins to be a mere vanity in being educated whether it be self-educated or merely state-educated. Education ought to be a searchlight given to a man to explore everything, but very specially the things most distant from himself. Education tends to be a spotlight; which is centered entirely on himself. Some improvement may be made by turning equally vivid and perhaps vulgar spotlights upon a large number of other people as well. But the only final cure is to turn off the limelight and let him realize the stars.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“I'm always made a little uncomfortable by studies that assert that Millennials are the most narcissistic generation in history. To me, being young has always meant being self-absorbed; in many ways, that's what youth is for.”

— Robin Marantz Henig

“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

“We're only here for a short while. And I think it's such a lucky accident, having been born, that we're almost obliged to pay attention. In some ways, this is getting far afield. I mean, we are - as far as we know - the only part of the universe that's self-conscious. We could even be the universe's form of consciousness. We might have come along so that the universe could look at itself. I don't know that, but we're made of the same stuff that stars are made of, or that floats around in space. But we're combined in such a way that we can describe what it's like to be alive, to be witnesses. Most of our experience is that of being a witness. We see and hear and smell other things. I think being alive is responding.”

— Mark Strand

“Most of the books I have are indicators of my insecurity. I really wanted to be an intellectual. I really wanted to understand Sartre. I thought that was what made people smart. I have tried to read Being and Nothingness no fewer than twenty times in my life. I really thought that every answer had to be in that book. Maybe it is. The truth is, I can't read anything with any distance. Every book is a self-help book to me. Just having them makes me feel better. I underline profusely but I don't retain much. Reading is like a drug. When I am reading from these books it feels like I am thinking what is being read, and that gives me a rush. That is enough. I glean what I can. I finish some of the unfinished thoughts lingering around in my head by adding the thoughts of geniuses and I build from there. There are bookmarks in most of the denser tomes at around page 20 to 40 because that was where I said, "I get it." Then I put them back on the shelf.”

— Marc Maron

“But she had loved her philosopher so strongly that she had made him believe that her body was aroused and ecstatic. Ibn Rushd had been fooled. Men were easily deceived in such matters because they wanted to believe they had the power to arouse. She wanted to make him believe he pleased her. But the truth was that she could give physical pleasure to a man but not receive it, she could only imagine what such pleasure might be like, she could watch and learn, and offer up to her lover the outward signs of it, while trying to fool herself, as well as him, that yes, she was being pleasured too, which made her an actress, a phony, and a self-deceiving fool.”

— Salman Rushdie

“That she had loved Sylveste because he was such a self-important bastard and made something noble of being a self-important bastard, did it with such utter aplomb that it became a kind of virtue, like the wearing of sackcloth”

— Alastair Reynolds

“Thus I liv'd mighty comfortably, my Mind being entirely composed by resigning to the Will of God, and throwing my self wholly upon the Disposal of his Providence. This made my Life better than sociable, for when I began to regret the want of Conversation, I would ask my self whether thus conversing mutually with my own Thoughts, and, as I hope I may say, with even God himself by Ejaculations, was not better than the utmost Enjoyment of humane Society in the World.”

— Daniel Defoe

“Yes, it was trying to get her under, this world with its mighty
self-satisfaction, with its smug rules of conduct, all made to be broken
by those who strutted and preened themselves on being what they
considered normal. They trod on the necks of those thousands of others
who, for God knew what reason, were not made as they were; they prided
themselves on their indignation, on what they proclaimed as their
righteous judgments.”

— Radclyffe Hall

“At my heaviest, I was 5'8 and 175 pounds. I ate well, but in too large quantities, and I rarely made a concerted effort to burn off the extra calories. I'd beat myself up about being overweight, even though I had the tools to be in shape. Then I'd resort to an unhealthy diet to lose the weight that was making me self-conscious.”

— Daphne Oz

“Within the strictures of commonsense reality and personal ability, we can choose to do anything we like in this world ... with one exception: We cannot choose what any of our choices will be. To do that, we would have to be capable of making ourselves into self-made individuals who can choose what they choose as opposed to being individuals who simply make choices. For instance, we may want to become bodybuilders and choose to do so. But if we do not want to become bodybuilders we cannot make ourselves into someone who does want to be a bodybuilder. For that to happen, there would have to be another self inside us who made us choose to want to become bodybuilders. And inside that self, there would have to be still another self who made that self want to choose to choose to make us want to become bodybuilders.”

— Thomas Ligotti

“I always thought Christians were the weak people. When you can't make it in life then you have to ask God. I really prided myself on being a self-made man.”

— Paul Henderson

“No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.”

— Flannery O'Connor

“The Nazis were tedious in their self-righteousness and triumphalism. They were like a winning soccer team at the after-match party, getting drunker and more boring and refusing to go home. He was sick of them. Some people might say that the USSR was similar, with its secret police, its rigid orthodoxy, and its puritan attitudes to such pleasures as abstract painting and fashion. They were wrong. Communism was a work in progress, with mistakes being made on the road to a fair society. The NKVD with its torture chambers was an aberration, a cancer in the body of Communism. One day it would be surgically removed. But probably not in wartime.”

— Ken Follett

“The mockery made him feel an outsider; and feeling an outsider he behaved like one, which increased the prejudice against him and intensified the contempt and hostility aroused by his physical defects. Which in turn increased his sense of being alien and alone. A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity.”

— Aldous Huxley

“It was the cause of many of Dad's outrages too, when people elected themselves his personal oracle of Delphi ... They'd made the mistake of abridging Dad, putting Dad in a nutshell, telling Dad How It Was (and getting it all wrong).
...
"The act of being personally misconstrued," Dad said, "informed to one's face one is no more complex than a few words haphazardly strung together like blotchy undershirts on a clothesline
well, it can fall the most self-possessed of individuals.”

— Marisha Pessl

“But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing out the she saids, the and thens, made her wince, and she felt foolish, appearing to know about the emotions of an imaginary being. Self-exposure was inevitable the moment she described a character's weakness; the reader was bound to speculate that she was describing herself. What other authority could she have?”

— Ian McEwan

“At some second transcendent moment in evolution, Edelman proposed, the development of "higher-order consciousness" was made possible in humans (and perhaps a few other species including apes and dolphins) by a higher level of reentrant signaling. Higher-order consciousness brings an unprecedented power of generalization and reflection, of recognizing past and future, so that finally self-consciousness, the awareness of being a self in the world, is achieved.”

— Oliver Sacks

“Sheltered by his caste, Sarcellus had not, as the impoverished must, made fear the pivot of his passions. As a result he possessed an immovable self-assurance. He felt. He acted. He judged. The fear of being wrong that so characterized Achamian simply did not exist for Cutias Sarcellus. Where Achamian was ignorant of the answers, Sarcellus was ignorant of the questions. No certitude, she thought, could be greater.”

— R. Scott Bakker

“In the morning and in the evening and at night in his dreams, this street was filled with constantly bustling traffic, which seen from above seemed like a continually self-replenishing mixture of distorted human figures and of the roofs of all sorts of vehicles, constantly scattered by new arrivals, out of which there arose a new, stronger, wilder mixture of noise, dust, and smells, and, catching and penetrating it all, a powerful light that was continually dispersed, carried away, and avidly refracted by the mass of objects that made such a physical impression on one's dazzled eye that it seemed as if a glass pane, hanging over the street and converging everything, were being smashed again and again with the utmost force.”

— Franz Kafka

“The radical hermeneutic of suspicion that characterizes all of post-modernity is essentially nihilistic, denying the very possibility of creative or healing love. In the cross and resurrection of Jesus we find the answer: the God who made the world is revealed in terms of a self-giving love that no hermeneutic of suspicion can ever touch, in a Self that found itself by giving itself away, in a Story that was never manipulative but always healing and recreating, and in a Reality that can truly be known, indeed to know which is to discover a new dimension of knowledge, the dimension of loving and being loved.”

— N.T. Wright

“[Having] appropriated to itself all conscious intelligence in the universe ... Man faces the existential crisis of being a solitary and mortal conscious ego thrown into an ultimately meaningless and unknowable universe ... and the psychological and biological crisis of living in a world that has come to be shaped in such a way that it precisely matches his world view-i.e., in a man-made environment that is increasingly mechanistic, atomized, soulless, and self-destructive.”

— Richard Tarnas

“I think being an only child created in me a degree of self-reliance, which I'm glad of. It made me perfectly happy with my own company and perhaps was good conditioning for the protracted solitude of writing books as slowly as I do.”

— Alan Hollinghurst

“Icebergs behoove the soul (both being self-made from elements least visible) to see themselves: fleshed, fair, erected, indivisible.”

— Elizabeth Bishop

“I understood that at the core, our essence is made of pure love. We are pure love-every single one of us. How can we not be, if we come from the Whole and return to it? I knew that realizing this meant never being afraid of who we are. Therefore, being love and being our true self is one and the same thing!”

— Anita Moorjani

“For me, this was all or nothing. I left no room for anything else. That goal was just for my own push, my own self-esteem. The fear of not being a success in my life made me push even harder.”

— Martin Lawrence

“I was an older brother. So I had to do a lot of things first. My father was a self-made man, and he would beat me senseless. But he was a Scotsman, and stubborn. I'm his son, and I'm stubborn, too. I go on being stubborn.”

— Harry Hay

“The journey toward authenticity, toward becoming whole is made palpable in Maureen Seaton's Sex Talks to Girls: A Memoir. It shines its considerable light on the passage from religion toward faith, from self-medication to sobriety, from daughterhood to motherhood, from being the disembodied 'good girl' to embracing her own bad lesbian self. In crisp chapters, Seaton leads us, step-by-step, over this harrowing and blissful road, so distinct from yet so much like our own.”

— Terry Wolverton

“I hate being moved. I hate that man who came in. So self-righteous, so cruel. He made fun of me, that's why I cried. You never did that. You led me into temptation by your - politeness.”

— Peter Ustinov

“You know, I think everybody I've seen has come from some other therapy, and almost invariably it's very much the same thing: the therapist is too disinterested, a little too aloof, a little too inactive. They're not really interested in the person, he doesn't relate to the person. All these things I've written so much about. That's why I've made such a practice really, over and over to hammer home the point of self-revelation and being more of yourself and showing yourself. Every book I write I want to get that in there.”

— Irvin D. Yalom

“When will we learn, when will the people of the world get up and say, enough is enough? God created us for fellowship. God created us so that we should form the human family, existing together because we were made for one another. We are not made for an exclusive self-sufficiency but for interdependence and we break the law of our being at our peril.”

— Desmond Tutu

“I have never got on with the quietist movements: they lapse too easily into self-congratulations: I have found the oneness, you have not. I prefer to look outside myself if I possibly can, not inside. Meditation reminds me too forcibly of being made to lie on a mat at nursery school and take an hour's nap.”

— Fay Weldon

“There's a different film being made in every mind. And of course, the star of the film is the mind, the personality, the self.”

— Frederick Lenz

“Human nature means battling constantly between being completely self-absorbed and trying to be a communal creature. Nature makes you a communal creature. The ultimate single-minded, self-centered creature is a cancer cell. And mostly, we're not made up of cancer cells.”

— George Lucas