Personal Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Not till then did his controllers allow him to suspect that death itself might not after all cure the illusion of being a soul—nay, might prove the entry into a world where that illusion raged infinite and unchecked. Escape for the soul, if not for the body, was offered him. He became able to know (and simultaneously refused the knowledge) that he had been wrong from the beginning, that souls and personal responsibility existed. He half saw: he wholly hated. The physical torture of the burning was not fiercer than his hatred of that.

Many an individual has turned from the mean, personal, acquisitive point of view to one that sees society as a whole and works for its benefit. If there has been such a change in one person, there can be the same change in many.

Personal abuse is no substitute for policy. It signals panic.

Margaret Thatcher

Art lifts man from his personal life into the universal life.

The negro cannot win the respect of the white people of the south or the peoples of the world if he is willing to sell the future of his children for his personal and immediate comfort and safety.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which every one has some vague right at the end

F. Scott Fitzgerald

A mother-complex is not got rid of by blindly reducing the mother to human proportions. Besides that we run the risk of dissolving the experience "Mother" into atoms, thus destroying something supremely valuable and throwing away the golden key which a good fairy laid in our cradle. That is why mankind has always instinctively added the pre-existent divine pair to the personal parents-the "god"father and "god"-mother of the newborn child-so that, from sheer unconsciousness or shortsighted rationalism, he should never forget himself so far as to invest his own parents with divinity.

The judge should not be young; he should have learned to know evil, not from his own soul, but from late and long observation of the nature of evil in others: knowledge should be his guide, not personal experience.

For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that personal recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom, and I have been led to believe, and to make someone else believe, in a renewal of affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel.

After five years' work I allowed myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up some short notes; these I enlarged in 1844 into a sketch of the conclusions, which then seemed to me probable: from that period to the present day I have steadily pursued the same object. I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.

I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence.

Edgar Allan Poe

It is the responsibility of Pastors to encourage, also by their personal witness, the practice of Eucharistic adoration, and exposition of the Blessed Sacrament in particular, as well as prayer of adoration before Christ present under the Eucharistic species.

Pope John Paul II

And above all, you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling…the question should never be: 'Do I like that kind of service?' but 'Are these doctrines true: Is holiness there? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to move to this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike for this particular door-keeper?

A life directed chiefly toward the fulfillment of personal desires will sooner or later always lead to bitter disappointment.

Albert Einstein

I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.... I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men, everywhere, could be free.

Abraham Lincoln

It is thus only this personal feeling of misery that we get rid of by acts of pity.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person.

Those moralists, on the other hand, who, following in the footsteps of Socrates, offer the individual a morality of self-control and temperance as a means to his own advantage, as his personal key to happiness, are the exceptions.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The only compensation which war offers for its manifold mischiefs, is in the great personal qualities to which it gives scope and occasion.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Knowing that conscious decisions and personal memory are much too small a place to live, every human being streams at night into the loving nowhere, or during the day, in some absorbing work.

Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve the problem. It stacks the cards, and in nine cases out of ten, it eliminates at least two useful suspects. The only effective love interest is that which creates a personal hazard for the detective - but which, at the same time, you instinctively feel to be a mere episode. A really good detective never gets married.

Raymond Chandler

The doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot.

Albert Einstein

The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy, and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.

Cooper: Did you use that $916 million loss to avoid paying personal federal income taxes for years?
Trump: Of course I do. Of course I do. And so do all of her donors, or most of her donors.... I pay tremendous numbers of taxes. I absolutely used it. And so did Warren Buffett and so did George Soros and so did many of the other people that Hillary is getting money from.

I am God's Lion, not the lion of passion....
I have no longing
except for the One.
When a wind of personal reaction comes,
I do not go along with it.
There are many winds full of anger,
and lust and greed. They move the rubbish around,
but the solid mountain of our true nature stays where it's always been.