Personal Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Joy adapts and changes, but it always endures,
even as a flicker of light born of our personal certainty that,
when everything is said and done, we are infinitely loved.

A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones

The artist's life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him [or her]-on the one hand, the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire... There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.

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?

I am sure that nothing has such a decisive influence upon a man's course as his personal appearance, and not so much his appearance as his belief in its attractiveness or unattractiveness.

I have come to discover through earnest personal experience and dedicated learning that ultimately the greatest help is self-help; that there is no other help but self-help— doing one's best, dedicating one's self wholeheartedly to a given task, which happens to have no end but is an ongoing process. I have done a lot during these years of my process. A swell in my process, I have changed from self-image actualization to self-actualization, from blindly following propaganda, organized truths, etc. to searching internally for the cause of my ignorance.

Editor's Preface In this book, originating in the year 1848, the requirement for being a Christian is forced up by the pseudonymous author to the supreme ideality. Yet the requirement should indeed be stated, presented, and heard. From the Christian point of view, there ought to be no scaling down of the requirement, nor suppression of it-instead of a personal admission and confession. The requirement should be heard-and I understand what is said as spoken to me alone—so that I might learn not only to resort to grace but to resort to it in relation to the use of grace. S. K.

Søren Kierkegaard

As far as your personal requirements are concerned, the ideal is to
have fewer involvements, fewer obligations, and fewer affairs,
business or whatever. However, so far as the interest of the larger
community is concerned, you must have as many involvements as
possible and as many activities as possible.

Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

Now, I'm not talking about a sentimental, shallow kind of love. I'm not talking about eros, which is a sort of aesthetic, romantic love. I'm not even talking about philia, which is a sort of intimate affection between personal friends. But I'm talking about agape. I'm talking about the love of God in the hearts of men. I'm talking about a type of love which will cause you to love the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does. We've got to love.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

To me, God is Truth and Love; God is ethics and morality: God is fearlessness. God is the source of Light and Life and yet He is above and beyond all these. God is conscience... He is a personal God to those who need His personal presence. He is embodied to those who need His touch. He is the purest essence. He simply is to those who have faith. He is all things to all men.

If God is not a personal being for me like my earthly father, He is infinitely more.

The contents of the personal unconscious are chiefly the feeling-toned complexes…The contents of the collective unconscious, on the other hand, are known as archetypes.

Any man who is intelligent must, on considering that health is of the utmost value to human beings, have the personal understanding necessary to help himself in diseases, and be able to understand and to judge what physicians say and what they administer to his body, being versed in each of these matters to a degree reasonable for a layman.

The function of Government must be to favor no small group at the expense of its duty to protect the rights of personal freedom and of private property of all its citizens.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The child realizes to every man his own earliest remembrance, and so supplies a defect in our education, or enables us to live over the unconscious history with a sympathy so tender as to be almost personal experience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way peace and security which he can not find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

Albert Einstein

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effiminated by position of nature, born halt and blind, through luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are called to be 'ambassadors for Christ' (2 Cor 5:20). Ours is a ministry of reconciliation... To be an ambassador for Christ means above all to invite everyone to a renewed personal encounter with the Lord Jesus.

Leadership means that a group, large or small, is willing to entrust authority to a person who has shown judgement, wisdom, personal appeal, and proven competence.

After death the soul possesses self-consciousness, otherwise, it would be the subject of spiritual death, which has already been disproved. With this self-consciousness necessarily remains personality and the consciousness of personal identity.

The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice and the desire for personal independence — these are the features of the Jewish tradition which make me thank my stars that I belong to it.

Albert Einstein

Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.

J. R. R. Tolkien

... there is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in the military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair.

John F. Kennedy

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.

I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.

Albert Einstein