Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

When you give your best, that's all you can ask of yourself, all that people can ask of you and all that god desires from you. No matter what the result, walk with your head held high.

Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause. He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws.

No one will take care of you if you don't take care of yourself.

Self-esteem is something you have to earn! The only way to achieve self-esteem is to work hard. People have an obligation to live up to their potential.

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.

People need responsibility. They resist assuming it, but they cannot get along without it.

Self-respect leads to self-discipline.

We must get rid of the idea of fulfilling what people expect us to do, and start to do what we expect from our lives.

Self-preservation isn't worth it if you can't live with the self you're preserving

Holiness is not the luxury of a few people, but a simple duty for you and me.

People are not here to meet your expectations.

The wise way to benefit humanity is to attend to your own affairs, and thus give other people an opportunity to look after theirs.

There is nothing enlightening about shrinking so that other people

I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, of this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

Men should soon make up their minds to be forgotten, and look about them, or within them, for some higher motive in what they do than the approbation of men, which is fame, namely, their duty; that they should be constantly and quietly at work, each in his sphere, regardless of effects, and leaving their fame to take care of itself.

Don't live your life to please other people.

You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.

It was easy to blame other people for treating me in ways I didn't like, but now I was seeing that I was the one at fault. The only way you can be mistreated is by allowing yourself to be mistreated, and that was something I did over and over again. Somehow, I needed to find that glimmer of self-respect, buried deep inside, that would allow me to say: I am never going to let that happen to me again. I needed to learn how to stand up for myself in a different way, but I didn't know how.

Without self-respect there can be no genuine success. Success won at the cost of self-respect is not success ? for what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own self-respect.

I finally stopped complaining about 'Why isn't everybody else making me what I want to be?' You can't rely solely on your agent or your managers to educate people as to who you are.

Our experience over the last 20 years has shown that indeed people must themselves become their own liberators. You cannot wait for somebody else to come and rescue you.

Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn’t done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity.

Self-satisfaction and self-pity are both condemned. What are people permitted to feel about themselves?

Let each person in relationship worry about Self-what Self is being, doing, and having; what Self is wanting, asking, giving; what Self is seeking, creating, experiencing, and all relationships would magnificently serve their purpose-and their participants!

I think the idea is that every person has to live for his or her own life and then make the choice to share it with other people. Maybe that is what makes people "participate.