Accepting Oneself Quotes

Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better. ~ Flannery O'Connor

To force oneself to believe and to accept a thing without understanding is political, and not spiritual or intellectual. ~ Gautama Buddha

Oh, this yearning to be white, this yearning to have straight hair, this lifelong striving to be different from the way one is created this great difficulty in accepting oneself, I knew it and saw only my own longing from outside, saw the absurdity of our yearning to be different from what we are ... ~ Max Frisch

God is the only one who knows how many children we should have, and we should be ready to accept them. One can't decide for oneself who comes into this world and who doesn't. That decision doesn't belong to us. ~ Mel Gibson

All companionship can consist in only the strengthening of neighboring solitudes, giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to become closer to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling – I have learned over and over again, there is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The notion of a conscious model of oneself as an individual entity actively trying to establish epistemic relations to the world and to oneself, I think, comes very close to what we traditionally mean by notions like "subjectivity". ~ Thomas Metzinger

Where one loves, one can follow without agreeing - one can surrender oneself with eyes open. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Searching all directions with one's awareness, one finds no one dearer than oneself. In the same way, others are fiercely dear to themselves. So one should not hurt others if one loves oneself. ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Oh, the joy-hogs! Oh 'enjoying oneself'! Another modern form of sickness. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Beauty is about being comfortable in your own skin. It's about knowing and accepting who you are. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

To underestimate oneself is as much an exaggeration of one's powers than the other. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

To see color as form means looking at the image in a new way, trying to free oneself from absorption in subject matter. ~ Cole Weston

For to wish to forget how much you loved someone - and then, to actually forget - can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. I have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting "the fundamental impermanence of all things." This acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. Often I feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness). ~ Maggie Nelson

Giving up on God and on oneself constitutes simultaneous surrender to the natural man. ~ Neal A. Maxwell

The rims of his eyelids were burning. A blow received straightens a man up and makes the body move forward, to return that blow, or a punch-to jump, to get a hard-on, to dance: to be alive. But a blow received may also cause you to bend over, to shake, to fall down, to die. When we see life, we call it beautiful. When we see death, we call it ugly. But it is more beautiful still to see oneself living at great speed, right up to the moment of death. Detectives, poets, domestic servants and priests rely on abjection. From it, they draw their power. It circulates in their veins. It nourishes them. ~ Jean Genet

First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher
must "once in his life" withdraw into himself and attempt,
within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences
that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy wisdom
(sagesse) is the philosophizer's quite personal affair. It must
arise as His wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending
toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from
the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute
insights. ~ Edmund Husserl

How could anyone mistake Mom for white? Mom was a proud black woman, the proudest I knew. She hated us having to take welfare food, hated accepting anything we needed but did not earn. We had a picture of Marcus Garvey on the living-room wall, talking about going back to Africa, talking about the power of blackness and the strength of the Negro heart. I couldn't imagine looking at Mom and not seeing that. ~ Ilyasah Shabazz

Accepting what is simply takes away the fight. It frees you from the struggle and, eventually, helps you move on. ~ Christina G. Hibbert

America was never designed to be fixed forever, but was meant to be fluid and evolving. ~ Bryant McGill

Peacefully and lovingly accepting who we are today requires honestly looking at our past. ~ Rob Martin

What a man is is the basis owhat he dreams and thinks, accepts and rejects, feels and perceives. ~ John Mason Brown

All my life I wanted to be accepted. ~ Khali Raymond

Learning to locate your own gut response is essential if you are to be able to identify and acknowledge your intuition. ~ Laurie Nadel

In love: a momentary instance of bein almost interested in someone else as in oneself! ~ Belle De Jour

CUSTOMER: These books are really stupid, aren't they?
BOOKSELLER: Which ones?
CUSTOMER: You know, the ones where animals like cats and mice are best friends.
BOOKSELLER: I suppose they're not very realistic, but then that's fiction.
CUSTOMER: They're more than unrealistic; they're really stupid.
BOOKSELLER: Well, writers use that kind of thing to teach kids about accepting people different to themselves, you know?
CUSTOMER: Yeah, well, books shouldn't pretend that different people get on like that and that everything is 'la de da' and wonderful, should they? Kids should learn that life's a bitch, and the sooner the better. ~ Jen Campbell

How is it that some celebrities, whom the average person would believe to have all the popularity a human being could want, still admit to feeling lonely? It is quite naive to assume that popularity is the remedy for loneliness. Loneliness does not necessarily equal physical solitude, it is the inability to be oneself and rightfully represented as oneself. ~ Criss Jami

So to conduct one's life as to realize oneself-this seems to me the highest attainment possible to a human being. It is the task of one and all of us, but most of us bungle it. ~ Henrik Ibsen

Simplicity is not a goal, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, as one approaches the real meaning of things. ~ Herbert Read

There are times when one cannot accept facts for fear of shattering one's being. As I listened to Ian's news, all of Digit's life, since my first meeting with him as a playful little ball of black fluff ten years earlier, passed through my mind. From that moment on, I came to live within an insulated part of myself. ~ Dian Fossey

But, when Scripture makes a clear distinction between the act of creation and the process of preservation, we cannot accept the idea of a progressive creation process. ~ Walter Lang

To remember oneself and to relax the body is something we have to do constantly. ~ Samael Aun Weor

To be strong in the Force is one thing. But to believe oneself to be all-powerful is to invite catastrophe. Remember, that even in the ethereal realm we inhabit, the unforeseen can occur. ~ James Luceno

Cosmopolitan discourse ... provides one with a _public gaze_ with which one can relate oneself to others in a different way. ~ Namsoon Kang

Retracing the various episodes of one's life, one is disconcerted to discover that one was not as noble as one thought oneself at the time. ~ Phyllis Bentley

A song for you
A song for me
Is how we relate our life to be ~ Patty Smith

To love others you've got to love yourself, but I love myself too much I've got no place for others. ~ Ahmed Mostafa