Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.
Henry Miller

The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.
Henry Miller

True strength lies in submission which permits one to dedicate his life, through devotion, to something beyond himself.
Henry Miller

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.
Thomas Paine

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
Thomas Paine

To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.
Edgar Allan Poe

Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live.
Leo Tolstoy

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.
Leo Tolstoy

We are so bound together that no man can labor for himself alone. Each blow he strikes in his own behalf helps to mold the universe.
Jerome K. Jerome

In Art, man reveals himself and not his objects.
Rabindranath Tagore

If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.
Immanuel Kant

No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself.
James Russell Lowell

He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.
Rainer Maria Rilke

I begin with the principle that all men are bores. Surely no one will prove himself so great a bore as to contradict me in this.
Soren Kierkegaard

Old age realizes the dreams of youth: look at Dean Swift; in his youth he built an asylum for the insane, in his old age he was himself an inmate.
Soren Kierkegaard

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.
H. L. Mencken

I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave.
Joseph Campbell

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.
Golda Meir

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.
Golda Meir

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.
F. Scott Fitzgerald