Best 43 quotes in «self sufficiency quotes» category

National self-sufficiency or "autarchy" is the ideal of [Adolf] Hitler, not of [Karl] Marx and [Vladimir] Lenin.

Self-sufficiency is the greatest of all wealth .

At root, I am happy with myself. I do not mind being alone.

A breath, to keep one going, must be one's own.

At this point in history, our society tends to elevate and reward the specialist...This concentrated focus has brought some benefits...It may also be a modern malady. Specialization, when taken too far and allowed to define who and what we are, becomes limiting. It robs us of our wholeness and our self-sufficiency. It misses the big picture and confines us to a narrow zoom. And it leaves us at the mercy of experts.

At thirty-nine, I learned how to change a tyre, how to shovel snow, how to stack wood. I learned how to meet a deadline without a shoulder to whine on. I became obsessed with firewood. If only there was alsways a fire in the fireplace, I knew that everything would be all right. (Prometheus must have been a women. I reverted to my ancient nature: inventing fire all day, having my liver plucked out all night.)

Before we can be grafted into Him, we must be stripped of our self-sufficiency and ego.

For all those who longed to find a best friend and found it in themselves

Equip yourself for your own needs.

For it is in your power to retire into yourself whenever you choose.

He repeated that she had to learn to be alone. Once she’d learned that, then she would know how to live with a man without clamouring and demanding and suffering disappointments.

for me obedience to another is the decay of self

I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

I admire the fog, how it fades into itself.

I should understand the land, not as a commodity, an inert fact to be taken for granted, but as an ultimate value, enduring and alive, useful and beautiful and mysterious and formidable and comforting, beneficent and terribly demanding, worthy of the best of man's attention and care... [My father] insisted that I learn to do the hand labor that the land required, knowing--and saying again and again--that the ability to do such work is the source of a confidence and an independence of character that can come no other way, not by money, not by education.

If there was one thing I'd learned, it was that you were responsible for your own ship. You had to look after the engine and make sure the plan was in order and ready to be flown. You were in charge of plotting your course. When you were in the pilot's seat, it was your hand on the throttle, no one else's. If your oil ran out or you lost an engine or the engine caught fire and you had to crash, you were the one saving yourself. No one else could do it for you.

If you'd called me an ox, I'd have said I was an ox; if you'd called me a horse, I'd have said I was a horse. If the reality is there and you refuse to accept the name men give it, you'll only lay yourself open to double harassment.

I had come to worry about those women who were full-time mothers and homemakers by choice. Did other, more career-minded women have the right to devalue them . . . ? Maybe it was time to slow down and look at the role restrictions imposed not only on women but the men around them, to search for the balance that could promote self-sufficiency . . .

If the light's not in you, you're in the dark.

Is one alive when other men are living?

I thought you’d be entirely self-sufficient.”“Oh I am,” I shoot back. “You should see my vibrator collection.

My self is all to me. I don't have any need of you.

Karou wished she could be the kind of girl who was complete unto herself, comfortable in solitude, serene. But she wasn't. She was lonely, and she feared the missingness within her as if it might expand and... cancel her. She craved a presence beside her, solid. Fingertips light at the nape of her neck and a voice meeting hers in the dark. Someone who would wait with an umbrella to walk her home in the rain, and smile like sunshine when he saw her coming. Who would dance with her on her balcony, keep his promises and know her secrets, and make a tiny world wherever he was, with just her and his arms and his whisper and her trust.

Moments later, I was climbing nervously into the back of the car. The driver wore the archetypal expression of an antagonist. No words were exchanged beyond the brief lines uttered to this nameless stranger, whose inclinations remained unclear. The car sped along empty roads and traversed dingy alleyways. Music blared from its speakers. I did not remember exhaling throughout the entire journey.

Most people spend their lives vulnerable, relying on the rest of the world to not take advantage of it.

She was herself unconscious of that faint hint of offishness which hung about her and repelled advances, an arrogance that stirred in people a peculiar irritation. They noticed her, admired her clothes, but that was all, for the self-sufficient uninterested manner adopted instinctively as a protective measure for her acute sensitiveness, in her child days, still clung to her.

Our can-do culture has made many of us believe that we should always be self-sufficient. Somewhere along the way, we also got the message that asking for help is a sign of weakness. We often forget that we’re interdependent creatures whose very existence depends on the kindness of others, including—with a bow to Tennessee Williams—strangers.

Rocky, if I’ve learned anything from my train wreck of a marriage, it’s that no one can take care of me better than I can.

No soul ever fell away from God without giving up prayer. Prayer is that which establishes contact with Divine Power and opens the invisible resources of heaven. However dark the way, when we pray, temptation can never master us. The first step downward in the average soul is the giving up of the practice of prayer, the breaking of the circuit with divinity, and the proclamation of one’s owns self sufficiency.

This time Elizabeth Ann didn't answer, because she herself didn't know what the matter was. But I do, and I'll tell you. The matter was that never before had she known what she was doing in school. She had always thought she was there to pass from one grade to another, and she was ever so startled to get a little glimpse of the fact that she was there to learn how to read and write and cipher and generally use her mind, so she could take care of herself when she came to be grown up. Of course, she didn't really know that till she did come to be grown up, but she had her first dim notion of it in that moment, and it made her feel the way you do when you're learning to skate and somebody pulls away the chair you've been leaning on and says, "Now, go it alone!

The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums. Granting the frailty, and no doubt the impermanence, of modern technology as a human contrivance, the man who can keep a fire in a stove or on a hearth is not only more durable, but wiser, closer to the meaning of fire, than the man who can only work a thermostat.

The fear of abandonment forced me to comply as a child, but I’m not forced to comply anymore. The key people in my life did reject me for telling the truth about my abuse, but I’m not alone. Even if the consequence for telling the truth is rejection from everyone I know, that’s not the same death threat that it was when I was a child. I’m a self-sufficient adult and abandonment no longer means the end of my life.

The store customer, who comes home with a package under his arm has learned nothing, except that a ten dollar bill is a source of power in the market place. The man or woman who has converted material into needed products via tools and skills has matured in the process.

The business of procuring the necessities of life has been shifted from the wood lot, the garden, the kitchen and the family to the factory and the large-scale enterprise. In our case, we moved our center back to the land.

The myth of self-sufficiency demands optimism without end, downplays life’s challenges, and shames us when, inevitably, we fall short.

We must rip the foundations out from under all the bastions of human reasoning that say, "I don't need God!" We must demolish every non-God story of life. We must pulverize every God-is-not-good life narrative.

To do it all and deprive others of doing is...a misguided notion.

To combat the sin of self-sufficiency, we need a special kind of faith. It's what I call Starbucks Rest Room Faith. Almost every Starbucks store has a sensor that controls the light in the rest room. You can't just flip a switch, and you can't make it go on by just waving your arm inside the door. You have to put your whole body into that dark room and trust that the light will come on as you enter. Faith in God is a lot like that. He doesn't offer a safety net, He doesn't let us hedge our bets, and He doesn't give any guaranteed results ahead of time. We have to be all in before the light comes on.

Words of the hero: "I am my fate.

What shall I do to be forever know, And make the Age to come my own? I shall like Beasts or Common People dy, Unless you write my Elegy; Whilst others great by being born are grown, Their Mothers Labour, not their own. In this scale Gold, in th' other Fame does ly, The weight of that mounts this so high. These men are Fortunes Jewels, moulded bright; Brought forth with their own fire and light. If I, her vulgar stone for either look, Out of my self it must be strook.

What shall I do to be forever known, And make the Age to come my own? I shall like Beasts or Common People dy, Unless you write my Elegy; Whilst others great by being born are grown, Their Mothers Labour, not their own. In this scale Gold, in th' other Fame does ly, The weight of that mounts this so high. These men are Fortunes Jewels, moulded bright; Brought forth with their own fire and light. If I, her vulgar stone for either look, Out of my self it must be strook.

Whenever you feel down, remember it is always daylight somewhere on this rock we call Earth. Whenever you are belittled by a human, remember that she or he does not represent the whole for the Earth is way bigger than any puny creature you may encounter.

You cannot want more for people than they want for themselves.