It is in self-limitation that a master first shows himself.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
George Bernard Shaw

Whoever is spared personal pain must feel himself called to help in diminishing the pain of others. We must all carry our share of the misery which lies upon the world.
Albert Schweitzer

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.
Albert Schweitzer

Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.
Albert Schweitzer

The true worth of a man is not to be found in man himself, but in the colours and textures that come alive in others.
Albert Schweitzer

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

There may be a great fire in our hearts, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.
Vincent Van Gogh

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

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.
Epicurus

When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.
James A. Baldwin

Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
James A. Baldwin

The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
Saul Alinsky

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.
John Steinbeck

I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man's self-respect is a sin.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Only he can understand what a farm is, what a country is, who shall have sacrificed part of himself to his farm or country, fought to save it, struggled to make it beautiful. Only then will the love of farm or country fill his heart.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.
Francis Bacon

There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man's self.
Francis Bacon

He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.
Rudyard Kipling