The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.
Igor Stravinsky

I'm asked all the time in interviews about who I am, and I know a few people my age who have a strong sense of self, but I couldn't say I know myself and sum it up and give it to you in a little package. I don't know myself at all yet.
Kristen Stewart

We are all ruled in what we do by impulses; and these impulses are so organized that our actions in general serve for our self preservation and that of the race.
Edna St. Vincent Millay

It seems to me that since I've had children, I've grown richer and deeper. They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.
Anne Tyler

I realized that I needed to be anonymous on the street and somebody else on the stage. I had tried to put my street self on the stage, but what they want is an actor on stage.
Bobby Darin

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.
Annie Dillard

If I could go back in time and tell my younger self that eventually that I'd become very successful writing Dune books after Frank Herbert's death, I would have laughed myself silly, I think, at how strange that prospect would be.
Kevin J. Anderson

With my daughter, who at the time was one, my domestic life needed to take more precedent and really with my own self I needed to develop quite a bit more. So that put Blur down the list of priorities quite a lot by the time I came to thinking about it.
Graham Coxon

To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.
Charles Horton Cooley

President Ford was a devoted, decent man of impeccable integrity who put service to his country before his own self interest. He helped heal our nation during a time of crisis, provided steady leadership and restored people's faith in the presidency and in government.
Mark Udall

That which has not a real excellency and value in it self, entertains no longer than the giddy Humour which recommended it to us holds.
Mary Astell

The most difficult part of playing Christ was that I had to keep up the image around the clock. As soon as the picture finished, I returned home to Sweden and tried to find my old self. It took six months to get back to normal.
Max von Sydow

I think I'm learning to be bolder in my career choices and be more confident in my personal life. I haven't always felt very secure as an individual, but now I feel I certain confidence and sense of self that gets me through the day a lot better than before.
Winona Ryder

A discontented young fellow, filled with self pride; he certainly should have considered it an honor to be sent on so respectable an embassy as he was.
Zebulon Pike

I use fake tan myself with a self tanning spray.
Lisa Snowdon

When a human being becomes so still that they begin to lose awareness of their gender, and they are simply looking into that abyss where there is no notion of self whatsoever, the world disappears. And that's really the only place to go. It's the only place to remain.
Andrew Cohen

He who busies himself with things other than improvement of his own self becomes perplexed in darkness and entangled in ruin. His evil spirits immerse him deep in vices and make his bad actions seem handsome.
Ali ibn Abi Talib

Like blind hens, we are ignorant of our own self and the depths within us.
Johannes Tauler

To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.
Charles Horton Cooley

People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.
Logan P. Smith