Quotes About Self-improvement

I ultimately worked the AA program for a year, and let me just tell you, all the slogans are true. It does look like a Saturday Night Live skit where there are ten posters hanging in a row on a wood-paneled wall in a church basement, but they are the damn truth, and if you live by them, they will rock your world.

We feel admiration when someone's abilities, accomplishments, or character inspires us, or when we see something else that inspires us, like art or nature. Interestingly, admiration often leads to us wanting to improve ourselves.

In fact, in my research I found that shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we can change and do better.

Somewhere along the way, we adopt this dangerous and debilitating belief system: I am what I accomplish and how well I accomplish it. Please. Perform. Perfect. Healthy striving is self-focused—How can I improve? Perfectionism is other-focused—What will they think?

The only way to become a better writer is to become a better person

All really educated men," he would soon write, "whether they have studied in the halls of a University, or in a cottage or a work-shop, are essentially self-educated.

My definition of a hero is a man who tests himself by a series of ordeals, each more difficult than the last; he's not competing in the world at all, he's competing only against himself.

We should remember the wise adage that goals (or commandments, in this case) are stars to guide us and not sticks with which to beat ourselves.

He who thinks that he is finished, is finished. How true. Those who think that they have arrived, have lost their way. Those who think they have reached their goal, have missed it. Those who think they are saints, are demons.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.

What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.

Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be.

Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted or enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.

Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.

He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him every day by day, and the divine being established.

Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmie that he can? Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made

They say that characters were engraven on the bathtub of king Tching-thang to this effect: 'renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.' I can understand that. Morning brings back the heroic ages.

A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit until we have so conducted that we feel like new men in the old.

I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

Non conosco nulla di più incoraggiante dell'incontestabile capacità dell'uomo di elevare la propria vita con uno sforzo cosciente.

It is to be remembered that by good deeds or words you encourage yourself, who always have need to witness or hear them.

There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life.

How we eat, drink, sleep, and use our desultory hours, now in these indifferent days, with no eye to observe and no occasion to excite us, determines our authority and capacity for the time to come.

One cannot too soon forget his errors and misdemeanors.