We're living at this funny time, where we're all urged to express ourselves as unique individuals, but on the other hand, we share a limited set of tools for doing that. It's easy to feel like nothing more than the sum of your consumer choices.
The death of Pope John Paul II led many of different faiths and of no faith to acknowledge their debt to the Roman Catholic Church for holding on to absolutes that the rest of us can measure ourselves against.
We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.
We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didn't walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud.
I've puzzled over the difficulty that students have with editing, and I think I've identified its source: It's their self-talk. We all talk to ourselves, inside our heads. That's what consciousness is.
Happiness depends upon ourselves.
When we hold back out of laziness, that is when we tie ourselves into knots of boredom.
In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness.
The opportunity to secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.
In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.
I really do think of it in moral terms. I think that we can't kid ourselves that the storytelling impulse is innocent and does nothing but bring good to the world.
Belize is so raw and so clear and so in-your-face. There's an opportunity to see something about human nature that you can't really see in a politer society, because the purpose of society is to mask ourselves from each other.
If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.
Our songs were not written to be listened to in headphones or on the radio. They were written to be played. All of the little infinite detail that went into the arrangements and giving ourselves lots of breathing room in terms of playing what we wanted to play and using up any ideas that we had - all of those were conceived to be performed.
We were thus led to organize ourselves, as men who had fought the war together, in order to support those statesmen who had truly understood the lessons of that World War, thus attempting to prevent its recurrence.
The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.
We have to be vulnerable as actors, but we have to protect ourselves.
We wanted to establish a new fan base over here. And second, we wanted to challenge ourselves. We wanted to bring what is ostensibly new music to fresh ears and see what lights them up.
All men are by nature equal, made all of the same earth by one Workman; and however we deceive ourselves, as dear unto God is the poor peasant as the mighty prince.
Please do not ask me to talk about my divorce. Mr. Ziegfeld and I are such very good friends. It is only a little matter quite between ourselves.
We found ourselves in a hole that I didn't dig, but I have dug, dug and dug to try to get out of that hole.
When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.
Our country, the United States of America, may be the world's largest economy and the world's only superpower, but we stretch ourselves dangerously thin by taking on commitments like Iraq with only a motley band of allies to share the burden.
The 40s onwards are when we can really begin to enjoy ourselves. For many women, this is when everything comes together, and they look better than ever. The great thing about getting older is you don't have to do/wear/say anything you don't want to. It wasn't until my very late 30s that I stopped worrying about what other people thought.
The way we can allow ourselves to do what we need to, no matter what others may say or do, is to choose love and defy fear.
All of us gave it all we've got, overcame a whole lot just being on the show and learned a lot about ourselves. We're just normal people trying to do what we love and follow our dreams.
The lies we tell ourselves are the most subtle of all lies.
The New York Times' was enigmatic: 'Some unimaginable gravitational force is pulling our entire galaxy in the opposite direction.' End of article. If you stop and think about that, we are recreating ourselves.
Imperfection and perfection go so hand in hand, and our dark and our light are so intertwined, that by trying to push the darkness or the so-called negative aspects of our life to the side... we are preventing ourselves from the fullness of life.
In order to represent life on the stage, we must rub elbows with life, live ourselves.
Part of this whole Sleater-Kinney 2.0 is breaking the rules. We wanted to tell our story... we feel like we need to stand up for ourselves.
I know too that we Americans like to think of ourselves as cleaner than clean, a healthy nation who would never take anything when a recent poll suggested that 65 per cent of the population would risk dying in 10 years if they would be guaranteed Olympic gold.
Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking.
We only have so much energy for our work, for our relationships, for ourselves. A smart person understands this and guards it carefully. Meanwhile, idiots focus on marginal productivity hacks and gains while they leak out energy each passing day.
Leadership is all about taking people on a journey. The challenge is that most of the time, we are asking people to follow us to places we ourselves have never been.
Again, as a gay man I look at that and say there's a hopelessness that surrounds it, but as a human being I look at it and say 'Why? Where's this disparity coming from, and why can't we as a culture and society dig deeper to examine that?' We're terrified of facing ourselves.
