When we are in love we seem to ourselves quite different from what we were before.
Blaise Pascal

Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.
Blaise Pascal

We conceal it from ourselves in vain - we must always love something. In those matters seemingly removed from love, the feeling is secretly to be found, and man cannot possibly live for a moment without it.
Blaise Pascal

We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.
Blaise Pascal

If our condition were truly happy, we would not seek diversion from it in order to make ourselves happy.
Blaise Pascal

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioned our characters in the wrong way.
William James

If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.
Michel Foucault

Cruelty towards others is always also cruelty towards ourselves.
Paul Tillich

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.
Sylvia Plath

A very Faustian choice is upon us: whether to accept our corrosive and risky behavior as the unavoidable price of population and economic growth, or to take stock of ourselves and search for a new environmental ethic.
E. O. Wilson

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.
Quentin Crisp

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

We pity in others only the those evils which we ourselves have experienced.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The joy we get as actors is out of transforming ourselves into something that's not necessarily anything true to ourselves. And it's a power - not being yourself, and being in the role; it's just like another prop.
Reese Witherspoon

The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather in spite of ourselves.
Victor Hugo

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
Victor Hugo

Not only does travel give us a new system of reckoning, it also brings to the fore unknown aspects of our own self. Our consciousness being broadened and enriched, we shall judge ourselves more correctly.
Ella Maillart

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.
Isaac Asimov