Quotes About Self-reliance

It's your life—but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

no one can afford not to be a man. No position can compensate for coming face to face with a robot when you are alone.

In the very desire for help one is apt to forget that the objective should be to enable the individual to stand on his own feet.

Long ago, I made up my mind that when things were said involving only me, I would pay no attention to them, except when valid criticism was carried by which I could profit.

What other people think of me is none of my business.

We must all face an unpalatable fact that we have, too often, a tendency to skim over; we proceed on the assumption that all men want freedom. This is not as true as we would like it to be. There are many men and women who are far happier when they have relinquished their freedom, when someone else guides them, makes their decisions for them, takes the responsibility for them and for their actions. They don't want to make up their minds. They don't want to stand on their own feet.

Life is what you make it. Always has been, always will be.

I am what I am and I have to accept myself; I was born like this, in this city, with this dialect, without money; I will give what I can give, I will take what I can take, I will endure what has to be endured.

I was not the woman who breaks into pieces under the blows of abandonment and absence, who goes mad, who dies. Only a few fragments had splintered off, for the rest I was well. I was whole, whole I would remain. To those who hurt me, I react giving back in kind. I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.

No one depended anymore on my care and, finally, even I was no longer a burden to myself.

both had always known instinctively that the limbs of a man are not nourished when he fills the belly of another, and that those who would make you believe it should sooner or later get what they deserve.

Mi dicevo ogni giorno: sono quello che sono e non posso fare altro che accettarmi; sono nata cosí, in questa cittá, con questo dialetto, senza soldi; daró quello che posso dare, mi prenderó quello che posso prendere, sopporteró ció che c'é da sopportare.

Si a la mujer la sabes educar, bien. Si no la sabes educar, déjala correr, que te hará daño.

Dizia a mim mesma todos os dias: sou o que sou e não posso senão me aceitar; nasci assim, nesta cidade, com este dialeto, sem dinheiro; vou dar aquilo que posso dar, vou pegar aquilo que posso pegar, vou suportar o que tiver de suportar.

Quem te ensinou a ler e a escrever, Cerullo?» Cerullo, pequena, de cabelos e olhos escuros e de bata, com um laço cor de rosa ao pescoço e apenas seis anos de vida, respondeu: «Eu.»

In fact I had no such interest, but I knew it was wrong to do things just because other people did. Other people couldn't be the reason why you did anything.

The hermit is he who needs a friend, and in the absence of a community has befriended himself.

Geniuses are their own saviors.

The need to create a citadel in which to hide from the world is characteristic of people with a schizoid disposition

The mind must make its own happiness; any troubles can be endured if the sufferer has resources of his own to sustain him.

People haven't time to learn anything. They buy things ready-made in stores. But since there are no stores where you can buy friends, people no longer have friends.

My practicality consists in this, in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall - that is my strength, my only strength.

You are sad because they abandon you and you have not fallen.

Night is a world lit by itself