Self Constraint Quotes

I only know as much about myself as my mind can work out under its current conditions. And its current conditions are not good.

Care about people's approval and you will be their prisoner.

The enslaving of the other is also the enslaving of the self.

My limits will be better marked. Both the limits I will set, and my own limits.

We do not escape our boundaries or our innermost being. We do not change. It is true we may be transformed, but we always walk within our boundaries, within the marked-off circle.

I am the slave of an internal power more powerful than my education.

At the end of the day, you can't reinvent yourself past a point, because you are you, and there are things that are inherently you that are always going to be there.

The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.

We make our customs lightly; once made, like our sins, they grip us in bands of steel; we become the creatures of our creation.

The only thing that limits you right now is you.

We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.

All of us should do what we want and have to do. We can only limit ourselves.

I think that's great - I just try not to be one of those people. I find the more I think about it, the less free I feel when I write and when I work.

I look at myself, and I see a Spanish person who's trying to be understood by an English-speaking audience and is putting a lot of energy into that, instead of into expressing himself freely and feeling comfortable.

The desire to impress others is one of the worst forms of mental imprisonment.

My biggest opponent was 'me.'

You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

Poverty is restriction and as such, it is the greatest injustice you can perpetrate upon yourself.

...by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it's too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?

I'd love to be able to fit in a box. Like one of those people who fit into small boxes. I'd love it.

Nothing's holding me back. If I'm held back, the only thing holding me back was me.

For years I tried to put myself in a box, and it frustrated me, so I had to let go and let the universe take its course.

Sometimes, my self-doubt became self-limiting.

There's no one to stop you but yourself.

Enclosing every thin man, there's a fat man demanding elbow-room.