Tamara Kras > Tamara's Quotes

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World

“If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.”
― Elie Wiesel

“Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.”
― Gustave Flaubert

“I will be calm. I will be mistress of myself.”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed. If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation. Which is why it is essential that we not respond impulsively to impressions; take a moment before reacting, and you will find it easier to maintain control.”
― Epictetus, The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness

“Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Peace comes from within.  Do not seek it without.”
― Siddhārtha Gautama

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.
...live in the question.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better. ”
― Mae West

“One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.”
― Czesław Miłosz

“It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

“And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want, not alone with your brittle frame.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
― C.G. Jung

“how you love yourself is
how you teach others
to love you”
― Rupi Kaur, Milk and honey

“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”
― James Baldwin, Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more”
― Lord Byron

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."

[The Minotaur]”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

“Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.”
― Virginia Woolf, Orlando