Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.
George Eliot

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.
George Eliot

Every man is his own hell.
H. L. Mencken

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.
H. L. Mencken

Judge: a law student who marks his own examination-papers.
H. L. Mencken

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.
Joseph Campbell

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.
Joseph Campbell

Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.
Joseph Campbell

What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.
Joseph Campbell

No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
William Blake

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
Walt Whitman

Freedom - to walk free and own no superior.
Walt Whitman

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.
Walt Whitman

I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.
Walt Whitman

Above all, this country is our own. Nobody has to get up in the morning and worry what his neighbors think of him. Being a Jew is no problem here.
Golda Meir

An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.
J. D. Salinger

Opponents confront us continually, but actually there is no opponent there. Enter deeply into an attack and neutralize it as you draw that misdirected force into your own sphere.
Morihei Ueshiba

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
F. Scott Fitzgerald