Quotes About Self-reliance

If somebody else is feeding you—even if you entered the community or the building of your own free will, even if all the doors and gates are currently open or unlocked—you may already be living in your future prison. All it takes is a change in management to turn your Holiday Inn into San Quentin.

die in place or undertake a desperate swim to greener pastures on other islands beckoning in the distance. The moral of the story: There doesn't need to be a pig trapper or a turkey farmer in the equation to cause a mass die-off event; nature can do it all on her own. And nature doesn't care about your schedule, or your personal problems.

Personal power is the ability to stand on your two feet with a wide smile amid a plethora of universal circumstances that are ready to crush you or devour you.

A free American girl can accommodate herself to circumstances without the aid of a man." -Nellie Bly

Those who are saved have only God to thank, and those who perish have only themselves to blame.

when you do for them what they should be doing for themselves, you create entitlement and dependency rather than empowerment.

Muchos nunca claman a Dios, hasta que están al final de su sabiduría; nunca acuden a Dios en busca de ayuda, siempre y cuando puedan ayudarse a sí mismos.

I never set out to be rich and famous. I wanted to follow my own path.

You might as well learn right now, you two, that the poorest guide you can have in life is what people will say.

Sergeant Missouri crouched close to the ground, pulling up his collar against the bitter, gusting winds. Show me, he thought tiredly, I'm from Missouri.

If there was anything Eileen had learned from her mother, it was the calming effect of work. "When in doubt, do," was Beattie's motto.

You know I don't like being told what to do. Then do without being told.

On lui donnait le moyen de se sauver seul. Tout homme sensé, à qui l'on fait une proposition de cette sorte, la considère, et n'en a que plus de mérite lorsqu'il la repousse. (Le roi de fer, partie 3, ch. 6, p. 322)

Il n'est toutefois de véritable élévation que conquise, de puissance et de gloire vraies qu'individuelles, forgées par la volonté et le travail. La presse qui promet l'une et l'autre ne saurait faire tomber dans son miroir à alouettes que les médiocres et les faibles. Balzac la condamne comme une fausse école d'ambition. (p. 149)

She had the loaded handbag of someone who camps out and seldom goes home, or who imagines life must be full of emergencies.

You can't blame anyone else, ... , no one but yourself. You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices.

They didn't break me. I broke myself.

I don't come with the wheelchair. The wheelchair comes with me.

Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap. What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self.

It is possible I can make very little of myself; but this little is everything, and better than what I allow to be made out of me by the might of others, by the training of custom, religion, the laws, the State.

We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart.

God cares only for what is his, busies himself with only himself, thinks only of himself, and has only himself before his eyes...He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is--A purely egoistic cause.

Ich bin meine Gattung, bin ohne Norm, ohne Gesetz, ohne Muster und dergleichen.

Entitled or unentitled — that does not concern me, if I am only powerful, I am of myself empowered, and need no other empowering and entitling.