Self-refinement Quotes

Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

I have an ability that I've already honed in on to get better.

The goal of spiritual life is not altered states, but altered traits

Let a man try faithfully, manfully to be right; he will grow daily more and more right. It is at bottom the condition on which all men have to cultivate themselves.

If a man wants to be of the greatest possible value to his fellow-creature s let him begin the long, solitary task of perfecting himself.

For every one step that you take in the pursuit of higher knowledge, take three steps in the perfection of your own character

I'm becoming more and more myself with time. I guess that's what grace is. The refinement of your soul through time.

A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.

Won't You guide me through the dark night of the soul That I may better understand Your way... Let me purify my thoughts and words and deeds That I may be a vehicle for Thee... Give me my rapture today.

[He] understood the people in a new way...The people is not everyone who speaks our language, nor yet the elect marked by the fiery stamp of genius. Not by birth, not by the work of one's hands, not by the wings of education is one elected into the people. But by one's inner self. Everyone forges his inner self year after year. One must try to temper, to cut, to polish one's soul so as to become a human being. And thereby become a tiny particle of one's own people.

I think that the older you get, the more you become your true, essential self. You find the things that make you happy. You whittle away the parts of yourself that mean less to you.

Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts.

I didn't go to high school, and I didn't go to grade school either. Education, I think, is for refinement and is probably a liability.

One of the hardest labours of the just man is to expunge from his soul a malevolence which it is difficult to efface.

Corn is cleaned with wind, and the Soul with chastening

I happen to think we’ve set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.

When you actively engage in gradually refining yourself, you retreat from your lazy ways of covering yourself or making excuses. Instead of feeling a persistent current of low-level shame, you move forward by using the creative possibilities of this moment, your current situation.

All noble enthusiasms pass through a feverish stage, and grow wiser and more serene.

He was always smoothing and polishing himself, and in the end he became blunt before he was sharp.

Much that is beautiful must be discarded So that we may resemble a taller Impression of ourselves.

Sufism has always had the function of purifying Islamic ethics and that fasting and tazkiya is like lighting a lamp.

Refine your senses a little more each day; stretch them...your awareness will pierce deeply into your body and into the world.

True taste is forever growing, learning, reading, worshipping, laying its hand upon its mouth because it is astonished, casting its shoes from off its feet because it finds all ground holy.

Waiting on God means increasing purity.