Jim Butcher Quotes

I give good advice. I do not always take it.

Sometimes it helps to scold yourself, to give yourself advice.

One of the reasons I'm an interesting person to be married to is my intensely late-blooming self-awareness.

Sometimes it might seem like I'm using my songs to give other people pointers. But mainly, they're for me, just little notes to myself that I collected, and the wisdom that I've read. I give myself a lot of advice.

I sometimes give myself admirable advice, but I am incapable of taking it.

It is as easy to give advice to yourself as to others, and as useless.

When we are in competition with ourselves, and match our todays against our yesterdays, we derive encouragement from past misfortunes and blemishes. Moreover, the competition with ourselves leaves unimpaired our benevolence toward our fellow men.

Most of us are wiser than we may appear to be. … On one level, wisdom is nothing more profound than an ability to follow one’s own advice.

I talk to myself everyone once in a while. Give myself very good advice. Sometimes I even take it.

I have concluded through careful empirical analysis and much thought that somebody is looking out for me, keeping track of what I think about things, forgiving me when I do less than I ought. Giving me strength to shoot for more than I think I’m capable of. I believe they know everything that I do and think, and they still love me, and I’ve concluded, after careful consideration, that this person keeping score is me.

If you're reading it in a book, folks, it ain't self-help. It's help.

The only advice I can give you is what you're telling yourself. Only, maybe you're too scared to listen.

The best man of all is he who knows everything himself. Good also the man who accepts another's sound advice; but the man who neither knows himself nor takes to hear what another says, he is no good at all.

The most important person on this earth is you. What are you doing to help the most important person in this world: you? To live right, you have to exercise, have goals and challenges.

It is easy to be wise on behalf of others than to be so for ourselves.

Improvement begins with I.

What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are. The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of the mind, for the moment realizes itself.

We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.

The greatest happiness is to transform one's feelings into action.

Sometimes I amaze even myself.

The only competition worthy a wise man is with himself.

Instead of wanting to be better than other people, let's channel that energy to be better than we were yesterday and then again to be the best we can be tomorrow.

I have the wherewithal to challenge myself for my entire life. That's a great gift.

I invented my life by taking for granted that everything I did not like would have an opposite, which I would like.

I'm just trying to grow. That's one thing I told myself is, 'Don't worry about who people say is the best player.'