Offspring, the due performance on religious rites, faithful service, highest conjugal happiness and heavenly bliss for the ancestors and oneself, depend on one's wife alone.
The human contribution is the essential ingredient. It is only in the giving of oneself to others that we truly live.
Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.
I don't find writing easy. That is because I do take great care: I rewrite a lot. If anything is sort of clumsy and not possible to read aloud to oneself, which I think one should do... it doesn't work.
One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love - any love - reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.
Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.
An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.
What becomes fascinating is the way the culture industry doesn't deny it and doesn't try to mitigate it, but tries to sell its products as a way of liberating oneself.
To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
One does not substitute oneself for the past, one merely adds to it a new link.
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.
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds.
One could look over the past century and ask oneself, has the increased longevity been good, bad or indifferent?
To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness.
To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
It is disturbing to discover in oneself these curious revelations of the validity of the Darwinian theory. If it is true that we have sprung from the ape, there are occasions when my own spring appears not to have been very far.
Until fairly recently, Amish teachers would reprimand the student who raised his or her hand as being too individualistic. Calling attention to oneself, or being 'prideful,' is one of the cardinal Amish worries. Having your name or photo in the papers, even talking to the press, is almost a sin.
The relationship to one's fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one's striving.
Obsessional does not necessarily mean sexual obsession, not even obsession for this, or for that in particular; to be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless.
Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.
Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
I don't watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.
Sport is and should remain a great school of life that supports young people in their personal development. It teaches respect for others and also for oneself.
Freedom is the possibility of development, of enhancement of one's life - or the possibility of withdrawing, shutting oneself up, denying and stultifying one's growth.
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.
It is after all the greatest art to limit and isolate oneself.
Reminiscence and self-parody are part of remaining true to oneself.
It's a question of not copying the masters, to look for something, good or bad, for oneself. To enter this liberated state of mind, one cannot copy the others.
Everyone should pursue whatever is original in oneself. That's the way for a long life in music.
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.
Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.
Real beauty is to be true to oneself. That's what makes me feel good.
An important consequence of freeing oneself from the fear of death is a radical opening to spirituality of a universal and non-denominational type.