Cat talk is a complicated, self-centered language. If you speak to your cat first, it probably won't speak back. Cats initiate conversations.
People who read books in public places are regarded with suspicion because they appear self-sufficient. When you seem self-sufficient, other people think that you think you're better than them, and they get resentful.
I think I'm a shy, self-conscious person who thinks he's being looked at and tries to look okay. Not in a hottie, narcissistic way necessarily.
Even today you can look through almost any consumer or professional publication and find headlines that possess not a single one of the necessary qualities, such as self-interest, news, or curiosity.
As international support for Obama's decision to attack Syria has collapsed, along with the credibility of government claims, the administration has fallen back on a standard pretext for war crimes when all else fails: the credibility of the threats of the self-designated policeman of the world.
No. I took this job in self-defense. Quain burns everything. Belen thinks jerky is all we need to survive. Flea's idea of a good meal is something that hasn't been in a garbage can first. And Kerrick poisoned us-' 'Not on purpose,' Kerrick said. 'The meat looked done.
Promoting self under the guise of promoting Christ is currently so common as to excite little notice.
I don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.
Don't try to change the world. First, change yourself or rather, your self-perception, and you find the world automatically corresponding to the level of your understanding. You will find that it has always been you who set the pace and depth of your experience by recognizing and honoring your true nature.
We always see our worst selves. Our most vulnerable selves. We need someone else to get close enough to tell us we’re wrong. Someone we trust.
The process of reclaiming the self is one of reconciliation with meaning.
Sometimes the best offense was avoiding self-destruction.
I was self-conscious of what I would call my "tree-trunk legs" because they are very muscular. . . but now I've learned to love them.
For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man. . . Some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.
Self-actualizing people - highly functioning people who live at extraordinary levels of awareness - train their minds to focus on what they intend to create and what they intend to manifest, and they won't let anybody change their mind.
Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.
Any analysis of 'sin' or 'evil' or 'demonic influence' or 'negative thinking' or 'systemic evil' or 'antisocial behavior' that fails to see the lack of self-dignity as the core of the problem will prove to be too shallow.
There was a much more self-destructive nature in 'Appetite. ' It was a going-for-it-at-all-cost thing that worked then.
She saw herself riding in the passenger seat, Sam behind the wheel. Like two of those little peg people in a toy car. Husband peg, wife peg, side by side. Facing the road and not looking at each other; for why would they need to, really, having gone beyond the visible surface long ago. No hope of admiring gazes anymore, no chance of unremitting adoration. Nothing left to show but their plain, true, homely, interior selves, which were actually much richer anyhow.
Self-discipline is the No. 1 delineating factor between the rich, the middle class and the poor.