Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.
Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.
We are really the victims of our own problems.
They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.
When I watch a movie, someone's beauty isn't what engages me: it's what's going on internally. And I imagine it's what the audience thinks, too.
Mortifications are often more painful than real calamities.
There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer --committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.
I am the source of my own suffering, because of the habits of my mind.
Wherever you go, you will always bear yourself about with you, and so you will always find yourself.
I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as 'first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into their social worlds.'
I've noticed from my fans that we hide the things that we are facing.
you can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.
I didn't tell him that what I was most scared of, most haunted by, was something I didn't understand and could never run away from. It was myself.
Do I create conflicts for myself? Sure I do.
Our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within.
That's good. I was worried. Of course, I do have a few things wrong with me, but those are strictly problems I keep inside. I'd hate to think they were obvious to anybody else. Especially at the swimming pool in the summer.
I believe that behind both the person who weighs 400 pounds and the one who weighs 85 there is a lot of baggage, and it has nothing to do with their bodies.
Everyone talks about success, but what happens before? There's always something you have to overcome.
At night when you're asleep, self-hatred's going to creep in. And you can blame it on the devil, the one who's bed you sleep in.
It’s not about what you said. It’s not about what you did. It’s not about what you love. It’s about them feeling bad about themselves.
Looking back upon the memories of the last 50 years. I perceive how calamities from within and aggression from without have come upon us in relentless succession, and that my life had never engaged a moment's respite from anxiety.
During her adult life, she was the de facto ruler of China.
Believe that others are better than you in the debths of their soul, although outwardly you may appear better than they.
But no man's a hero to himself.
Everything becomes so problematic because of basic faults: from a discontent with myself.
Who are we? Whom do we want to become? How do we perceive ourselves? How do we want to be perceived? These questions of identity are often at the core of our own internal struggles. Resolve them, and you are closer to being free.