Quotes About Self-improvement

fed up with being unhappy." Some people may feel, as I did, that they cannot live with themselves anymore. Inner peace then becomes their first priority.

If you cannot surrender, take action immediately: Speak up or do something to bring about a change in the situation — or remove yourself from it. Take responsibility for your life.

Trying to become a good or better human being sounds like a commendable and high-minded thing to do, yet it is an endeavor you cannot ultimately succeed in unless there is a shift in consciousness.

Not his match! And have you not the heart in you to be anything but best? How many are his match? How many in this world do you think stand in the front rank? Are all the rest of us to give up and sit on our hands rather than serve humbly where we deserve?

I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty...But I am too busy thinking about myself.

Will-power, he saw, was not a thing one could suddenly decree oneself to possess. It must be built up imperceptibly and laboriously out of a succession of small efforts to meet definite objects, out of the facing of daily difficulties instead of cleverly eluding them, or shifting their burden on others.

Now, whatever, either on good or upon bad grounds, tends to raise a man in his own opinion, produces a sort of swelling and triumph, that is extremely grateful to the human mind.

Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first from his teachers; the second more personal and important, from himself.

So I started trying to behave as if my defects of character were gone. I considered how I would behave if I were who I wanted to be, and I acted that way to the best of my poor acting ability. I made lots of mistakes along the way, but I began to improve with time. It was hard.

Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better....

The only way to escape the personal corruption of praise is to go on working.

People got insights into what was bothering them, but they hardly did a damn thing to change.

You have considerable power to construct self-helping thoughts, feelings and actions as well as to construct self-defeating behaviors. You have the ability, if you use it, to choose healthy instead of unhealthy thinking, feeling and acting.

Something had to be done. Apart from robbing a bank—a line of endeavor for which I lacked the needful preliminary training—I saw no way to get ahead in the world except by forcing some kind of opening for myself as a fiction writer. Thenceforth, for several years, I set aside five hours a night, five nights a week, for this kind of work. After my nine-hour office day, I came home, got a shower and a rubdown; and as soon as dinner was ended, I went to my desk and began writing.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

I am by nature a self-improver. I have read Gibbon, I have read Proust. I read the Old and New Testaments and most of Shakespeare. I studied French. I have meditated. I jogged. I learned to draw, using the right side of my brain.

You are excrement. You can change yourself into gold.

He could not change the man he had been, but these hands would make him the man he could be

the very best footballers were competing against themselves to become as good as they could be.

This is the work that gives your life meaning; the work that lets you be your best self and helps you become a better self; the work that is an unparalleled pleasure when it goes well and is worth fighting and sacrificing for when it goes poorly; the work that you are willing to organize your life around.

A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with a man is what he makes of himself.