Quotes About Self-reliance

All we ask is to be let alone.

Accept nothing, Believe no one, Challenge everything. It's the only law I live by.

People don't save other people. People save themselves.

Who are you, anyway? Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them. I could have sworn we just met, Madeleine said. And that you don't know anything about me. Henry stood up. With a slightly offended air but undiminished confidence, he said, People save themselves. He left her with that to think about.

Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them...People don't save other people. People save themselves.

Everyday I feel more and more like a full-fledged adult. Even though it was (metaphorically) only yesterday I was sloshing in the door at four a.m. after Dollar Beer Night, I find myself with a mortgage, four types of insurance, and a non-laundry-quarter-based retirement fund.

kids without constantly looking over their shoulders for approval.

Mine was the first generation of latchkey kids, referring to Generation Xers whose personal identity was, in part, shaped by the independence their working parents fostered when they left us alone after school.

I have issues with my parents, but their greatest gift was forcing me to produce my own results. Through the ups and downs of my life, my work ethic is my most prized characteristic. No matter what kind of pinch I'm in, I can fight my way to the other side with grit and determination.

I don't need "support." I need . . . I need . . . It occurs to me that I have no idea how that sentence might end.

In the past, I was a perpetual victim; how I was doing in any given moment depended on what happened to me. Today I do my best to avoid this kind of 'victim thinking.' Instead, how I am doing is determined by how I respond to what happens to me.

By seventh grade, the notes stopped and it was assumed that I'd know how to fend for myself for dinner if there was a ten-dollar bill on the table. There were three dinner options at my house. In reverse order of preference: Number three—broiled chicken dusted with paprika. Number two—ten on the table. And number one—dinner with Mom and her boyfriend, David, at a five-star restaurant.

I believe things will work out for us if we just believe in ourselves.

Nothing matters except what it takes to survive. You remember this, Madeline: You're born alone and you die alone. In between, you make deals.

People who climb mountains are lonely people; loneliness is needed. Acquaintances and friends are great things, but climbers need defined mental space that is untouched and unbothered by anyone.

What she did speak of was freedom, the ability to come and go as she pleased and, most importantly, to climb. Jim, she felt, was the man who could give her the keys to that independence.

With barely two francs to rub together, she traveled alone and on a shoestring, living on the food she'd packed. While rejoicing in again finding herself independent and teetering thousands of feet above the valley floor, negotiating life-and-death moves on the rock walls and being responsible to no one but herself.

While rejoicing in again finding herself independent and teetering thousands of feet above the valley floor, negotiating life-and-death moves on the rock walls and being responsible to no one but herself.

Finally he and his partner Gary Ball were driven off the mountain by a storm, while Lydia, feeling strong and confident, continued climbing alone.

You have to be okay on your own before you can have a healthy relationship with another person.

He lives by what he calls the Homeless Credo: "Do what you have to do today. Tomorrow will come. And if it doesn't, you won't have to deal with it.

Because there's nothing better than autonomy. Because

That's Harris all over—so ready to take the burden of everything himself, and put it on the backs of other people.

We shall never be content until each man makes his own weather and keeps it to himself.