I will not call that person happy who knows no rest because of his enemies, who is the butt of fun by all and for whom no one has any empathy, who is as if held on a leash by others, who has lost himself in hedonistic pursuits, who preys on those weaker to him and wags his tail for his superiors.
He who goes step by step always finds himself level with a step.
My father was a trained accountant, a BCom from Sydenham College and a self-taught violinist. In the 1920s, when he was in his teens, he heard a great violinist, Jascha Heifetz, and he was so inspired listening to him that he bought himself a violin, and with a little help from an Italian teacher, he learned to play it.
An educated man is thoroughly inoculated against humbug, thinks for himself and tries to give his thoughts, in speech or on paper, some style.
Many people have played themselves to death. Many people have eaten and drunk themselves to death. Nobody ever thought himself to death.
Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he has a sense of humor.
A young man, be his merit what it will, can never raise himself; but must, like the ivy round the oak, twine himself round some man of great power and interest.
A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.
I don't think there's any player that's more talented than Alex Rodriguez. He cares very deeply about doing well. Baseball is his life. He puts a lot of pressure on himself.
The first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself.
Every man must decide for himself whether he shall master his world or be mastered by it.
As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.
For the victor peace means the preservation of the position of power which he has secured. For the vanquished it means resigning himself to the position left to him.
A man is hindered and distracted in proportion as he draws outward things to himself.
Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself.
Some statements concern the conscious states of the animal, what he is to himself as an inner life; others concern his original and acquired ways of response, his behavior, what he is an outside observer.
He works his business and manipulates and keeps himself in front of the world.
A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.
Who has a harder fight than he who is striving to overcome himself.
A man with an invention on which he has spent his life, but has no means to get it developed for the good of humanity - or even patented for himself - must feel the pinch of poverty very acutely.
Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first from his teachers; the second, more personal and important, from himself.
And I love that even in the toughest moments, when we're all sweating it - when we're worried that the bill won't pass, and it seems like all is lost - Barack never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise. Just like his grandmother, he just keeps getting up and moving forward... with patience and wisdom, and courage and grace.
The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.
I was initially rather charmed by David Cameron, but I think he's revealing himself to be a slightly darker and less charismatic figure than he first appeared. There's a brutality about him.
In all worldly things that a man pursues with the greatest eagerness he finds not half the pleasure in the possession that he proposed to himself in the expectation.
No one reaches the Oval Office without a great deal of admiration for the institution - and himself - so it's unsurprising that sitting presidents favor the biographies of former presidents.
Nothing so completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity himself, than straightforward and simple integrity in another.
The sanity of the average banquet speaker lasts about two and a half months; at the end of that time he begins to mutter to himself, and calls out in his sleep.
Every man, when he comes to be sensible of his natural rights, and to feel his own importance, will consider himself as fully equal to any other person whatever.
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
Man, of all the animals, is probably the only one to regard himself as a great delicacy.
He fell in love with himself at first sight, and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful. Self-love seems so often unrequited.
Plato said that virtue has no master. If a person does not honor this principle and rejoice in it, but is purchasable for money, he creates many masters for himself.
A lot of newspapers say, Terence Stamp is playing himself and we're as bored as he is.
A man's got to work for more than himself and his kids to feel right.
Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions.
