Quotes & Sayings About Helping Ourselves

Nature compels us to recognize the fact of mutual dependence, each life necessarily helping the other lives who are linked to it. In the very fibers of our being, we bear within ourselves the fact of the solidarity of life. — Albert Schweitzer

Leadership is not just a privilege, but a responsibility to which we commit ourselves to helping to elevate those around us. — Tanveer Naseer

Recognize that it is not really possible to steadily help others when we ourselves are not in good physical, mental, or emotional state. We may be able to carry on for a while, but sooner or later we end up feeling depleted, discouraged, or weak. We cannot keep on giving when we are running on an empty tank. We need to be solid. — Nhat Hanh

survive difficult parenting moments, and they want their kids and their family to thrive. As parents ourselves, we share these same goals for our own families. In our nobler, calmer, saner moments, we care about nurturing our kids' minds, increasing their sense of wonder, and helping them reach their — Daniel J. Siegel

We are in this world not only for ourselves but for others. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The attachment to parental figures I am trying to describe here is an attachment to parents who have inflicted injury on their children. It is an attachment that prevents us from helping ourselves. The unfulfilled natural needs of the child are later transferred to therapists, partners, or our own children. We cannot believe that those needs were really ignored, or possibly even trampled on by our parents in such a way that we were forced to repress them. We hope that the other people we relate to will finally give us what we have been looking for, understand, support, and respect us, and relieve us of the difficult decisions life brings with it. As these expectations are fostered by the denial of childhood reality, we cannot give them up. As I said earlier, they cannot be relinquished by an act of will. But they will disappear in time if we are determined to face up to our own truth. This is not easy. It is almost always painful. But it is possible. In — Alice Miller

Ben Says: We can only help better humanity if we better ourselves first. Education, diligence, passion, charity~helping all we can, when we can...will go a long way towards making our world a better place.

Timothy Pina
Bullying Ben — Timothy Pina

Every time we help an animal, we are healing ourselves, over and over. — Elayne Boosler

This is a lyrical guide that addresses the deep human yearning to make a difference. It's full of indelible stories reminding us that, yes, helping people is hard-but it's both possible and infinitely rewarding. A Path Appears offers practical steps that any of us can take to empower others, and ourselves. — Anne Rice

That's what I've found through yoga: yoga helps us to sort of rewire the mind so that we can literally become more mindful of the conversation we're having on the back end, what we're telling ourselves. — MC Yogi

This surrender isn't a one-time thing but is continually embraced over a lifetime. There will be an initial surrendering to God, breaking the self. God will keep this process current through circumstances, helping us to continue to deny ourselves. — Ryan Shaw

When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker ... but as survivors. Survivors who don't get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it. Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand. I hope to one day see a sea of people all wearing silver ribbons as a sign that they understand the secret battle, and as a celebration of the victories made each day as we individually pull ourselves up out of our foxholes to see our scars heal, and to remember what the sun looks like. — Jenny Lawson

When I returned home soon afterwards, it was with a newly awakened sense of what Australian literature was good for: helping us define ourselves in relation to an Anglo past and American present, for example, or airing the wounds suffered by indigenous Australia, or inhabiting those new frictions that result from our expanding cultural pluralism. Above all, it could teach us to dwell more easily in a landscape that did not accord with the metaphors and myth-kitty that was our northern inheritance. — George Williamson

There is a natural and inviolable tendency in things to bloom into whatever they truly are in the core of their being. All we have to do is align ourselves with what wants to happen naturally and put in the effort that is our part in helping it happen. — David Richo

There was a time when only wise books were read helping us to bear our pain and misery. This, after all, is not quite the same as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics. And yet the world is different from what it seems to be and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings. — Czeslaw Milosz

Our help does not come from Washington, but from ourselves. — Henry Ford

Lent is a good time for sacrificing. Let us deny ourselves something every day to help others, — Pope Francis

Selfishness is the root of all jealousy. When we are caught up thinking about ourselves, we can't think about anyone else. — Anna M. Aquino

Why stand we here trembling around, calling on God for help, and not ourselves, in whom God dwells? — William Blake

As we mature in faith, our willingness is tested, expanded, and refined. We become more conscious of our limitations and turn to God. The necessity of God's grace becomes clearer as we become more attuned and accurate in our recognition of our dependence on God and less sure of anything that causes us to describe ourselves self-righteously. At times, when confronted by the less-than-ideal behavior of others, we may recognize that we are capable of similar actions and give thankds to God for helping us avoid unwelcome pitfalls. Scripture instructs us to be holy as God is holy, yet we increasingly realize the impossibility of holy behavior unless it is brought about by the Spirit's empowerment and our willing responsiveness and cooperation. Many people use spiritual direction as a window through which to notice and attend to their own expectations of willingness and willfulness. — Jeannette A. Bakke

Service rendered as a gift or love-offering to Life: work that is engaged in, not for self or for profit, but as an act of love and service, these bring the doer a harvest of blessings ... When we serve and when we give, we open ourselves to receive life's richest blessings, its greatest prizes, and its most enduring lessons. — Henry Thomas Hamblin

The job is, if we are willing to take it seriously, to help ourselves to be more perfectly what we are, to be more full, more actualizing, more realizing in fact, what we are in potentiality. — Abraham Maslow

When we serve others, we serve ourselves. Do not think, I will help others - think rather, I will help my own, my world, because I cannot otherwise be happy. — Paramahansa Yogananda

We can't be useful to ourselves unless we're useful to others ... Anyone concerned only by his own well-being will suffer eventually. Anyone concerned with the well-being of others takes care of himself without even thinking about it. Even if we decide to remain selfish. let us be intelligently selfish - let us help others. — Dalai Lama

In lifting another person, we also lift ourselves. — Seth Adam Smith

The power of fiction is that it gives us, as readers, the opportunity to move inside another human being, to look out through that person's eyes, hear with her ears, think with his thoughts, feel with her feelings. It is the only form of art which can accomplish that feat so deeply, so completely. And thus it is the perfect bridge for helping us coming to know the other - the other inside as well as outside ourselves. (x) — Marion Dane Bauer

People and situations always show us what we need to see and learn about ourselves, and when we take responsibility for our own feelings, how others treat us also changes. Everything in life is there to teach us something about ourselves. Don't blame others, or try to separate yourself from them. Be grateful that they are helping you to become conscious of yourself and your own ego-mind an consciousness. — Mada Eliza Dalian

So most skeptics who criticize us are really just misinformed and kind of ignorant. They're just assuming something about us. We're quite critical ourselves, but we're here to help people. — Ryan Buell

If we can augment our gift giving by giving more of ourselves to those we love, all the time and in various ways, we will have a good chance of helping them and ourselves live happier, better lives. — Earl Nightingale

Extinction, that's where it's going, that's where we're headed. And we're going that way because we're all so fucking afraid of it. We're so afraid of dying off that we're setting ourselves up for exactly that. Keeping away from each other, rarely making eye contact with those we don't already know. Not helping when folks need help. Avoiding confrontation and staying away when we see anything which might instill fear. Doing our best to stay out of trouble, while in effect creating more trouble. — Trent Zelazny

The only way for us to help ourselves is to help others and to listen to each other's stories. — Elie Wiesel

If we stop thinking of ourselves and only of helping others, you will start to see a dramatic improvement in the suffering we are all going through. — Deepak Chopra

Finding voice is a socially responsible political act. We don't just do it for ourselves. And helping someone to find voice demands a spiritual partnership with that seeker. It's an exercise of compassion. — Mary Rose O'Reilley

The brain-disease model overlooks four fundamental truths: (1) our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; (3) we have the ability to regulate our own physiology, including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching; and (4) we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

We work on ourselves in order to help others, but also we help others in order to work on ourselves. — Pema Chodron

Because when everything is said and done... the world runs on kindness. It simply has to, or we'd never be a able to bear ourselves. It might not seem so to you now, but it will when you're older." ~Ariel — Kathleen Glasgow

Goals have a way of refocusing your life. They give you purpose and a target to shoot for. They are the compass of our dreams, helping us set a steady course. Goals comprise direction and progress. When we lose sight of our goals, we tend to lose sight of ourselves and who we are trying to become, who God has made us to be. — Mark Batterson

When we harm others we harm ourselves; when we help others we help ourselves. — Bryant McGill

Adult women, all of us, have to come to grips with how we have been affected by gender norms, and how we have been silenced. We have to help our daughters. Understanding it within ourselves and helping our young girls stand up for themselves is one way. — Jane Fonda

As we give of our time, talents and resources to tend the needs of the sick, offer food to the hungry and teach the dependent to stand on their own, we enrich ourselves spiritually beyond our ability to comprehend. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

As we help others, we cannot help but help ourselves. — Ben Cohen

It is a weakness to think that any one is dependent on me, and that I can do good to another. This belief is the mother of all our attachment, and through this attachment comes all our pain. We must inform our minds that no one in this universe depends upon us; not one beggar depends on our charity; not one soul on our kindness; not one living thing on our help. All are helped on by nature, and will be so helped even though millions of us were not here. The course of nature will not stop for such as you and me; it is, as already pointed out, only a blessed privilege to you and to me that we are allowed, in the way of helping others, to educate ourselves. This is a great lesson to learn in life, and when we have learned it fully, we shall never be unhappy; we can go and mix without harm in society anywhere and everywhere. — Swami Vivekananda

We will establish ourselves in Palestine whether you like it or not ... You can hasten our arrival or you can equally retard it. It is however better for you to help us so as to avoid our constructive powers being turned into a destructive power which will overthrow the world. — Chaim Weizmann

Non nobis solum nati sumus.
(Not for ourselves alone are we born.) — Marcus Tullius Cicero

The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority. — Honore De Balzac

Consequential strangers help us stretch beyond the relatively rigid boxes that the people who have known us the longest - our family and close friends - often put us into. Through interacting with people who do not know us as well, we are more free to experiment with ourselves, and less likely to have our new behaviors and roles reflected back to us by people who object, 'But that's not like you!' — Melinda Blau

we are reminded more than ever that we are not independent. We are interdependent. We rely on one another for the fulfillment of our legitimate needs and the satisfaction of our deepest desire. Life is not simply about the selfish pursuit of the-best-version-of-ourselves. Rather, the more we contribute to helping others become the-best-version-of-themselves, the more progress we make in the attainment — Matthew Kelly

We in Los Angeles, who have ourselves been helped to stand up - to recover and rebuild after a disaster - want to help the families and communities of the Gulf Coast,. — Antonio Villaraigosa

Individually we can work on ourselves. By working on your own ego and developing truth, control, and an equitable inner dialogue, you individualize the spirit within you through the process of observation. If you work on yourself, the progress you make radiates invisibly to others, helping them and giving them courage, which also improves the global picture. After all-your ego is a part of the world ego, and as you control it, you lessen the overall influence of the world ego while expanding the presence of truth on our planet. — Stuart Wilde

So, it's important for us to acknowledge that we're prone to be conservative, and in turn surround ourselves with individuals who will help break down our conservatism. — Shigeru Miyamoto

The more we help others, the more we help ourselves — Muhammad Ali

When we help ourselves, we find moments of happiness. When we help others, we find lasting fulfillment. — Simon Sinek

To me it seems that to give happiness is a far nobler goal that to attain it: and that what we exist for is much more a matter of relations to others than a matter of individual progress: much more a matter of helping others to heaven than of getting there ourselves. — Lewis Carroll

What would the world look like if we asked ourselves the following more often; are our actions helping others find a way to feel more freer, more dignified and more beautiful? — Jacqueline Novogratz

We're called to speak to people to whom we often don't feel like speaking; to refrain from surrounding ourselves with people "just like us," whose thoughts, ideas, and actions we can more or less manage and control; to share not just with the poor, but with the rich, the mediocre, the irritating, the Republicans, the Democrats, because we never know who the poor are. We never know whose heart is hemorrhaging. We never know who needs a kind work, a smile, a helping hand. — Heather King

We're trained, in our culture, to take care of ourselves first. Even flight attendants tell you to put on your own oxygen mask before helping those around you. But they never tell you what happens afterwards. How do you live with yourself if you survive and the person next to you doesn't? — Tracy Weber

I've had broken bones and cuts and dashes and tears from movies, but when I was five, my mom put the biscuits up high so we wouldn't be helping ourselves. So, one day I asked to stand up on a chair to get a biscuit, and it fell, and the corner of the chair went right into the side of my eye, and it made a big hole in there. — Gerard Butler

Educators best serve students by helping them be more self-reflective. The only way any of us can improve - as Coach Graham taught me - is if we develop a real ability to assess ourselves. If we can't accurately do that, how can we tell if we're getting better or worse? — Randy Pausch

To handle this new world, we need generational intelligence. The reason we struggle with other generations is not that they are "the problem." The reason we struggle with other generations is that we don't understand them. We don't know why they think differently, so we stereotype, criticize, or make jokes. But when we start to understand another generation - rather than attempting to maneuver others into seeing things our way - we open ourselves to new possibilities of relating, helping, reaching, encouraging, and loving them. — Haydn Shaw

The help we give to others creates the ripple of good feeling we give to ourselves. — Gina Greenlee

Muse is going to be part of everyday life as an indispensable tool helping people overcome mental, physical and emotional barriers. It's going to allow us to free ourselves in ways we never thought possible. — Ariel Garten

Obey the voice within - it commands us to give of ourselves and help others. As long as we have the capacity to give, we are alive — Kirk Douglas

The craving for equality can express itself either as a desire to pull everyone down to our own level (by belittling them, excluding them, tripping them up) or as a desire to raise ourselves up along with everyone else (by acknowledging them, helping them, and rejoicing in their success). — Friedrich Nietzsche

We should teach, particularly ourselves, that nobody is a nobody. We are someone, and with God's help we can accomplish all things. — Marvin J. Ashton

In a culture that is becoming ever more story-stupid, in which a representative of the Coca-Cola company can, with a straight face, pronounce, as he donates a collection of archival Coca-Cola commercials to the Library of Congress, that 'Coca-Cola has become an integral part of people's lives by helping to tell these stories,' it is perhaps not surprising that people have trouble teaching and receiving a novel as complex and flawed as Huck Finn, but it is even more urgent that we learn to look passionately and technically at stories, if only to protect ourselves from the false and manipulative ones being circulated among us. — George Saunders

They wanted to teach us the meaning of x in relation to pi, as opposed to helping us better understand ourselves and each other. They wanted us to know when the Magna Carta was signed-never mind what it was-as opposed to discussing birth control. — Jay Asher

Each one of us is finite, and if we can spread ourselves out in a way to inspire and help other people to be all they can be, I think that's so much more important than one person's glory. — Felicia Day

By helping others, we make ourselves better, and by helping others heal, we heal ourselves. I think we can do that on an individual level and a worldwide level. I hope people have a chance to give that a little bit of thought. — Charles Martin Smith

Spirituality doesn't mean a blind belief in a spiritual teaching. Spirituality is a practice that brings relief, communication, and transformation. Everyone needs a spiritual dimension in life. Without a spiritual dimension, it's very challenging to be with the daily difficulties we all encounter. With a spiritual practice, you're no longer afraid. Along with your physical body, you have a spiritual body. The practices of breathing, walking, concentration, and understanding can help you greatly in dealing with your emotions, in listening to and embracing your suffering, and in helping you to recognize and embrace the suffering of another person. If we have this capacity, then we can develop a real and lasting spiritual intimacy with ourselves and with others. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Sufis teach that we first must battle and destroy the evil within ourselves by shining upon it the good within, and then we learn to battle the evil in others by helping their higher selves gain control of their lower selves. — Feisal Abdul Rauf

Success has nothing to do with what we accomplish for ourselves, but the amount of hard works we put forward to others — Diyar Harraz

We come to realize that other people's welfare is just as important as our own. In helping them, we help ourselves. In helping ourselves, we help the world. — Pema Chodron

The very best reason parents are so special ... is because we are the holders of a priceless gift, a gift we received from countless generations we never knew, a gift that only we now possess and only we can give to our children. That unique gift, of course, is the gift of ourselves. Whatever we can do to give that gift, and to help others receive it, is worth the challenge of all our human endeavor. — Fred Rogers

Psychoanalysis gets interesting when it shifts the focus from making us more intelligible to ourselves to helping us become more curious about how strange we really are. And so, I would argue, does art. — Maggie Nelson

But, y'know, today I got a lot of help myself. There're tons of things we can't do ourselves, right? And that's why we're helped out. If someone, or something, can lend you a helping hand, great, I say! After all, we're all in this together! — Sakura Tsukuba

We must daily speak positivity into our life's surrounding ourselves with God fearing people along our journey, helping to lead us towards prosperity & the Promise Land. — Takina Cupp

The true teachers are those who help us think for ourselves. — Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

The ego prevents us from helping ourselves by presenting a false notion of what it really means to help ourselves. — Gelek Rimpoche

One of the fundamental demonstrations of our natural instinct to Bond with each other is a will to give. Rather than domination, our most basic urge is to reach out to another human being, even at a cost to ourselves. Giving to others-the urge to empathize, to be compassionate, and to help others altruistically-is not the exception to the rule, but our natural state of being. Our impulse to connect with each other has developed an automatic desire to do for others, even at personal cost. Altruism comes naturally to us. It is selfishness that is culturally conditioned and a sign of pathology. — Lynne McTaggart

We have learned how to develop five-minute and even one-minute managers. But we would do better to ask ourselves what it takes to be an executive who helps build a better future. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

What do you expect - not indifference or ingratitude?' (-Miss Benson) 'It is better not to expect or calculate consequences. The longer I live, the more fully I see that. Let us try simply to do right actions, without thinking of the feelings they are to call out in others. We know that no holy or self-denying effort can fall to the ground vain and useless; but the sweep of eternity is large, and God along knows when the effect is to be produced. We are trying to do right now, and to feel right; don't let us perplex ourselves with endeavoring to map out how she should feel, or how she should show her feelings.' (-Thurstan) — Elizabeth Gaskell

Women must commit to use our power-to on our own behalf so we can translate it into the power to help others and ourselves. — Gloria Feldt

Purple puts us in touch with the part of ourselves that is regal. Purple is the queen in all women; it helps us keep our backs straight and heads held high. — Byllye Avery

Help does not come from anywhere outside - it comes only from within ourselves. — Abhijit Naskar

God will never help us be anyone other than ourselves. — Joyce Meyer

One of the greatest barriers to connection is the cultural importance we place on "going it alone." Somehow we've come to equate success with not needing anyone. Many of us are willing to extend a helping hand, but we're very reluctant to reach out for help when we need it ourselves. It's as if we've divided the world into "those who offer help" and "those who need help." The truth is that we are both. — Brene Brown

Great was the work of creation, but greater was the work of redemption. Great wisdom was seen in making us - but more miraculous wisdom in saving us. Great power was seen in bringing us out of nothing - but greater power in helping us when we were worse than nothing. ( ... ) In the creation, God gave us ourselves; in the redemption, He gave us Himself. — Thomas Watson

Helping others is the way we help ourselves. — Oprah Winfrey

The call now is for each of us to ask ourselves: are we doing all we can to help build the country of our dreams? — Nelson Mandela

Helping those less fortunate than us is a blessed opportunity to show thanks for the gifts of life that we ourselves enjoy. — Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum

Let us remember that the main purpose of American aid is not to help other nations, but to help ourselves. — Richard M. Nixon

We need to be our own guide. We can live a much more peaceful and happy life if we think about positive growth of ourselves and others, and its effects on the universe. -Hina Hashmi — Hina Hashmi

Family farmers are small farmers who love the land. They're still not getting enough money for their product and are rapidly losing their battle to stay in business. By helping the American family farmer, we will in turn help ourselves out of the economic hole that we find ourselves in today. It doesn't really matter how we got here; the point is, we have to dig our way out. — Willie Nelson

A dojo [pracice hall] is a miniature cosmos where we make contact with ourselves - our fears, anxieties, reactions, and habits. It is an arena of confined conflict where we confront an opponent who is not an opponent but rather a partner engaged in helping us understand ourselves more fully. — Joe Hyams

If we want to be used for the benefit of mankind-helping the Lord with his mission-we must ourselves be in a position to be used by him. — Elaine A. Cannon

This paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, of listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences other than one's own, of getting out of the boundaries of one's own experience. There's a currently popular argument that books help us feel empathy, but if they do so they do it by helping us imagine that we are people we are not. Or to go deeper within ourselves, to be more aware of what it means to be heartbroken, or ill, or six, or ninety-six, or completely lost. Not just versions of our self rendered awesome and eternally justified and always right, living in a world in which other people only exist to help reinforce our magnificence, though those kinds of books and movies exist in abundance to cater to the male imagination. Which is a reminder that literature and art can also help us fail at empathy if it sequesters us in the Big Old Fortress of Magnificent Me. — Rebecca Solnit

We instinctively tend to limit for whom we exert ourselves. We do it for people like us, and for people whom we like. Jesus will have none of that. By depicting a Samaritan helping a Jew, Jesus could not have found a more forceful way to say that anyone at all in need - regardless of race, politics, class, and religion - is your neighbour. Not everyone is your brother or sister in faith, but everyone is your neighbour, and you must love your neighbour. — Timothy Keller

Over the past seventy years the various identity struggles have to some degree remediated the great wrongs that have been done to workers, people of color, Indigenous Peoples, women, gays and lesbians, and the disabled, while helping to humanize our society overall. But they have also had a shadow side in the sense that they have encouraged us to think of ourselves more as determined than as self-determining, more as victims of 'isms' (racism, sexism, capitalism, ableism) than as human beings who have the power of choice. For our own survival we must assume individual and collective responsibility for creating a new nation - one that is loved rather than feared and one that does not have to bribe and bully other nations to win support. — Grace Lee Boggs

The very purpose of religion is to control yourself, not to criticize others. Rather, we must criticize ourselves. How much am I doing about my anger? About my attachment, about my hatred, about my pride, my jealousy? These are the things which we must check in daily life. — Dalai Lama

Americans should never forget that the founders of this country, like all who have served her in uniform, were willing to die defending everything its flag represents. It's so easy to get lost in the controversies that divide us. But I believe, no matter what our race, religion, or beliefs may be, that Americans should be able to come together to keep our country rooted in what made it great: a land of opportunity, a place where people can make something of themselves, limited only by their imaginations and willingness to work hard; a country where we can all come together, whatever our differences, for the greater good; a country of hands up, not handouts, where we try to live by the meaning of the words "Love thy neighbor," and put as much effort into helping others as we do helping ourselves. By doing those things, we can continue to live up to the idea of "One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. — Marcus Luttrell