Quotes About Self-reliance

To me, a lot of what makes a good actor is not what a teacher tells you to do but how you respond when youre on your own.

The truly successful teacher is the one you will never need again.

For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.

Why should we try, why not just take the world as it is? I told her how he had said that we had to try because the alternative wasn't blankness – it only meant that if we didn't try ourselves, we would never be free of other people's inventions.

You might even say I loved my punishment of solitary confinement. Whoever doesn't need other human beings, Father quoted Aristotle, must be a god or an animal. For hours on end, I enjoyed being both. I didn't mind.

Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed.

You know what happens when you feed the birds? They forget to fly south and freeze to death.

Even if I had expected it, even if I had known what I was going to do with my life, it would have knocked the wind out of me. When something that violent hits you, you can't help but lose your balance and fall. And after you pick yourself up, you realize you can't trust anybody to save you- not your husband, not your mother, not God. So what can you do to stop yourself from tilting and falling all over again?

Whenever others disapprove of you, you must disregard them and be the only

Too little wood and you bent too quickly to listen to other people's ideas, unable to stand on your own. [...] Too much water and you flowed in too many directions.

They say this is what happens if you lack metal. You begin to think as an independent person.

Vergüenza es caerte cuando nadie empuja.

Nadie, ni yo ni nadie, puede andar este camino por ti. Habrás de recorrerlo tú solo. No está lejos; lo tienes a tu alcance. Tal vez estás en él desde que naciste, sin saberlo. Tal vez está en todas partes: en el mar y en la tierra.

I was like a bird, my wings once carried on a wind of lies. I would beat those wings to stay aloft, and when the wind suddenly died or buffeted me around, I would keep beating those strong wings and fly in my own slice of wind

Whenever others disapprove of you, you must disregard them and be the only one to judge your own decisions and actions

I would like to have your sureness. I am waiting for love, the core of a woman's life. Don't wait for it, I said. Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. And then love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me.

For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue — that I had to do the job myself.

Don't wait for it, I said. Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me.

I'm neurotic--in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.

Speak for yourself, always. It is lack of confidence. You can say things as well as Dostoevsky, Elie Faure or anybody you quote. Dare to speak for yourself. Let the other people lie in your blood, but faceless, nameless, diluted, masticated by you, reproduced etc.

For our anxiety is the one thing we cannot place on the shoulders of others, it suffocates them.

Don't wait for it," I said. "Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you. It was only when I wrote my first book that the world I wanted to live in opened to me." "I feel doomed to

She was always storming alone, being angry alone, going through vast emotional upheavals in which he did not take part.

American culture, perhaps more than any other, prizes individualism. Our narratives of art, politics, and business idolize the person who triumphs against the odds, with only himself or herself to answer to. The lone wolf. The stranger in town. The maverick. The plucky kid. The Final Girl. You've only got yourself, in the end. It's all up to you.