Quotes About Self-reliance

To owe what you had not yet earned, to have to work to earn what you had already spent, was a personal diminishment, an insult to nature and common sense.

An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.

He said that when we finally did get the farm paid for we could tell everybody to go to hell. That was what he lived for, to own his farm without having to say please or thank you to a living soul.

She was going about her life, taking her pleasures as she found them, suffering what was hers to suffer, doing what she had to do. She had about her no air of self-pity or complaint. And this could only have been because, in her own heart, she was not pitying herself or complaining.

My wish is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.

Let us trust to ourselves, see all with our own eyes; Let these be our oracles, our tripods and our gods.

He is his own best friend, and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy, and is afraid of solitude.59 Such

When the Duke of Wei offered him the prime ministry he dismissed the royal messengers with a curtness indicative of a writer's dreams: "Go away quickly, and do not soil me with your presence. I had rather amuse and enjoy myself in a filthy ditch than be subject to the rules and restrictions in the court of a sovereign.

God preserve me from my friends," he concluded; "I will take care of my enemies myself.

The man who does not wish to be merely one of the mass only needs to cease to be easy on himself.

To be happy means to be self-sufficient.

Loskiel reported some Indian tribes of the northeast as "so lazy that they plant nothing themselves, but rely entirely upon the expectation that others will not refuse to share their produce with them. Since the industrious thus enjoy no more of the fruits of their labor than the idle, they plant less every year.

Dependence leads to fear; fear leads to comparisons; comparisons lead to competition, and competition eventually destroys us by degrading us to imitation, conformity, infantilism or mediocrity.

Until a person has discovered and dares to follow his own inner gleam, we may be sure of one thing: he will be leaning in either negative or positive dependence on someone outside himself!

A man can't soar too high, when he flies with his own wings.

Enlightenment means taking full responsibility for your life.

Make your own rules or be a slave to another man's.

The apple tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion, the horse, how he shall take his prey.

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

People naturally despise a dependant.

Every one is expected to look out for himself here. I fancy that there would be very little rising if men were expected to rise for the sake of others, in America.

It's not when you realise that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realise that you don't need any aid.

I am not one of those women who can stand things.

I reckon I'll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life, but thank God I won't ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who's got two cents to buy a stamp.