Justify Yourself Quotes & Sayings

Are you living to justify yourself, or are you living because you are justified? — Timothy Keller

Buy it." This is my sister Amy's advice in regard to everything, from a taxidermied horse head to a camouflage thong. "Just get it," she says. "You'll feel better." Eye something closely or pick it up for further inspection, and she'll move in to justify the cost. "It's not really that expensive, and, besides, won't you be getting a tax refund? Go on. Treat yourself. — David Sedaris

Do not turn yourself from an end into a means-one does not justify the other. — Lord Acton

Do you really believe what you do in the service of your country, for the men you fight beside, is something you need to explain to me?" My voice was just above a whisper, my face a breath from his.

"You think you have to justify yourself to me? Me? Someone who's never had to march umpteen miles with 150 pounds on her back, or been shot at, or gone days on little to no sleep? Someone who hasn't spent the last ten years in harsh conditions, with few comforts, someone who's never been asked to do incredibly difficult things to keep people safe?" I kissed him again, the tips of my wet fingers resting lightly on his jaw. "Where would we all be without people like you? — Amy Harmon

Don't try to justify yourself on the ground that somebody must do this kind of work. Let "somebody," not yourself, take the responsibility ... Many a man has dwarfed his manhood, cramped his intellect, crushed his aspiration, blunted his finer sensibilities, in some mean, narrow occupation because there was money in it. — Orison Swett Marden

The narratives we create in order to justify our actions and choices become in so many ways who we are. They are the things we say back to ourselves to explain our complicated lives. Perhaps the reason you've not yet been able to forgive yourself is that you're still invested in your self-loathing. Perhaps not forgiving yourself is the flip side of your stealing-this-now cycle. Would you be a better or worse person if you forgave yourself for the bad things you did? If you perpetually condemn yourself for being a liar and a thief, does that make you good? — Cheryl Strayed

Many times in your life you may think you are failing, but ultimately you will express yourself and that expression will justify your life. — Irving Stone

Being honest when you're dealing with others is easier to do because your honesty is on the table for all to view ... Being honest with yourself is more difficult because you only have to justify it in private where no one can see it. — Jeffrey Gitomer

Try for once to justify the meaning of your existence as it were a posteriori by setting yourself an aim, a goal ... an exalted and noble 'to this end.' Perish in pursuit of this and only this — Friedrich Nietzsche

Is it true that you don't love me anymore?"
"Yes."
"Why? Because I lied to you? Because I left you? Because I humiliated you?"
"No. Just when I felt deceived, abandoned, humiliated, I loved you very much, I wanted you more than in any other moment of our life together."
"And then?"
"I don't love you anymore because, to justify yourself, you said that you had fallen into a void, an absence of sense, and it wasn't true."
"It was."
"No. Now I know what an absence of sense is and what happens if you manage to get back to the surface from it. You, you don't know. At most you glanced down, you got frightened, and you plugged up the hole with Carla's body. — Elena Ferrante

My wife and I were never happy here. Spain can be narrow-minded, and provincial. In LA you don't have to justify yourself. I think I will leave here again soon and move back there. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

You don't have to justify yourself to me. You did what you did. — Sue Grafton

It is so much easier to deal with the dead than with the living. The dead are out of the way, merely characters from stories about the past, never again unreadable, no misunderstandings possible, the pain coming from them stable and manageable. nor do you have to explain yourself to them, to justify the fact of your life. — Aleksandar Hemon

Do not look only at yourself, and you will see much. Do not justify yourself, and you will be distinguished. Do not brag, and you will have merit. Do not be prideful, and your work will endure. — Laozi

Illegibility
of this world. All things twice over.
The strong clocks justify
the splitting hour,
hoarsely.
You , clamped
into your deepest part,
climb out of yourself
for ever. — Paul Celan

Don't rush to justify yourself with a verbal argument; your choice of words may unmake what you made. — Israelmore Ayivor

Love your sport. Never do it to please someone else; it has to be yours. That is all that will justify the hard work. Compete against yourself, not others, for that is who is truly your best competition. — Peggy Fleming

Pause now to ask yourself the following question: 'Am I dreaming or awake, right now?' Be serious, really try to answer the question to the best of your ability and be ready to justify your answer. — Stephen LaBerge

Information exists for a reason, as well as the Consciousness. The Ego and the Self are important concepts to one's character, to one's alpha and omega. However, how do you know what you know? How do you predict? How you reason? How do you justify? How do you interpret? What is the difference between logic and fantasy? When is the line blurred, and when is the blurred line clear? When you stop living, and dive into existence, you can uncover the world behind yourself; the divine ground. Truth itself wears a mask, but if you dive deep enough, you can wear the mask of Truth. So let me ask you, how well do you know your reality? How well do you know your imagination? Have you stood on the ground behind your reality? Have you seen the mask of Truth, and if so, have you worn its mask? — Lionel Suggs

Never justify yourself to people who don't matter — Steven Aitchison

Never whine, never complain, never try to justify yourself. — Robert Greene

To leave in search of yourself, of your real needs, is easier when you don't have to justify yourself to anyone, when there are not too many people bestowing you their attention. — Isabelle Adjani

But if you have an unmessianic sense of nondestiny, this is unlikely to be a problem: you won't consider yourself important enough to justify breaking a solemn, public vow. — Anonymous

To succeed in this competition means finding yourself in a place where you call the shots and gets the gain. This is not an easy feat, unless you are born into it. if you are not, you will need to out-smart your equals. You need to be more ambitious than they are. You need to work harder. You need to look better and smarter. You need to justify why it should be you and not them. It's a competition. — Emi Iyalla

Often when you go into a relationship with someone you like, you have to justify why you like that person. You only see what you want to see and you deny there are things you don't like about that person. You lie to yourself just to make yourself right. Then you make assumptions, and one of the assumptions is "My love will change this person." But this is not true. Your love will not change anybody. If others change, it's because they want to change, not because you can change them. Then something happens between the two of you, and you get hurt. Suddenly you see what you didn't want to see before, only now it is amplified by your emotional poison. Now you have to justify your emotional pain and blame them for your choices. — Miguel Ruiz

He lacked the sort of ambition that JB and Jude had, ... that always made him think a fraction of them was already living in some imagined future, the contours of which were crystallized only to them. JB's ambition was fueled by a lust for that future, for his speedy arrival to it; Jude's , he thought, was motivated more by a fear that if he didn't move forward, he would somehow slip back to his past, the life he had left and about which he would tell none of them. And it wasn't only Jude and JB who possessed this quality: New York was populated by the ambitious. It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common. Ambition and atheism: "Ambition is my only religion," JB had told him ... Only here did you feel compelled to somehow justify anything short of rabidity for your career; only here did you have to apologize for having faith in something other than yourself. — Hanya Yanagihara

Pause, breathe, and lift, undefined, what is possible. Let the feeling of celebration come upon you, even if you do not comprehend cerebral reasons to justify it. For from that center, it will generate its own, able to carry you, until the original ones manifest, from that very portal you chose to fashion, unrestricted. — Tom Althouse

When you decided to share your dreams with others be aware of discouraging response. Don't try to justify yourself when it happens. Keep calm and keep your eyes on the prize (your dreams). — Euginia Herlihy

You don't love me, Sebastian. You don't have any idea what love really is. You can't love anyone or anything until you love your own existence, first. Love can only grow out of a respect for your own life. When you love yourself, your own existence, then you love someone who can enhance your existence, share it with you, and make it more pleasurable. When you hate yourself and believe your existence is evil, then you can only hate, you can only experience the shell of love, that longing for something good, but you have nothing to base it in but hatred. You taint the very concept of love, Sebastian, with your corrupted longing for it. You want me only to justify your hatred, to be your partner in self-loathing. — Terry Goodkind

You cannot harden your heart to the future just because of your past. You cannot use cruelty against yourself to justify cruelty to others. — Marie Lu

The thing I will say is that probably culturally, women are treated differently, which means, I think, you're criticized more, you have to listen a little bit more, you have to justify yourself. — Lisa Randall

Every choice closes doors ," I said, "and at some point you are left in the little room of yourself. I think most people who get to that room go crazy because they're surrounded with missed possibilities and no principle to explain or justify why they made the choices they did. I don't invite unhappiness, Aaron. Avoiding conflict may not be the noblest principle, but it works for me. — Michael Nava

There is never a need to justify anything to others, only yourself. — Steven Redhead

I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions ... Don't take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can't. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself. — Noam Chomsky

Perfectionism is searching for faults to justify low self-esteem. It is a guaranteed failure and fantasy. — Brittany Burgunder

No. You can't work your way into heaven. Anytime you try and justify yourself with works, you disqualify yourself with works. What I do here, every day, for the rest of my life, is only my way of saying, 'Lord, regardless of what eternity holds for me, let me give something back to you. I know it doesn't even no scorecard. But let me make something of my life before I go.. and then, Lord, I'm at your mercy. — Mitch Albom

Unlike most of life, what you do really matters. Your actions have real consequences. You have to pay attention and focus, and that's very satisfying. It forces you to pay great attention and you lose yourself in the task at hand. Without the risk, that wouldn't happen, so the risk is an essential part of climbing, and that's hard for some people to grasp. You can't justify the risk when things go wrong and people die. The greater the risk, the greater the reward in most aspects of life, and in climbing that's certainly true, too. It's very physical, you use your mind and your body. — Jon Krakauer

In a sense, you're always mythologizing your life; it's always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your "epicness." But when you're writing a memoir, you're trying to make your life epic and it's not - nobody's life is. — Sherman Alexie

Seeing when you justify yourself and when you blame others is not a reason to criticize yourself, but actually an opportunity to recognize what all people do and how it imprisons us in a very limited perspective of this world. — Pema Chodron

Self expression is a tricky
thing. Just as you start to feel
comfortable with yourself after years
of not, you then have to justify
yourself to other people. — Yrsa Daley-Ward

Envy shrugged. 'Can no value be found in good intentions?'
'What, precisely, are you trying to justify? And to me, or yourself?'
She glared, then quickened her pace. 'You're no fun at all,' she sniffed as she pulled
ahead, 'and presumptuous as well. I'm going to talk with Tool, his moods don't
swing!'
No, they just hang there, twisting in the wind. — Steven Erikson

When you experience discomfort in your body and a strong reaction to what's happening, and yet you choose not to express your emotions, you've probably convinced yourself of one of these myths to justify your choice: Myth 1: The other person can't handle it. (Yes she can. It's that you think you can't handle being in the presence of her emotional reaction.) Myth 2: It's not the "right" time to bring this up. (Ask yourself: Is the time really not right, or is it just that you feel uncomfortable?) Myth 3: It will make the situation worse. (Short term or long term? In the short term, some conflict may arise. In the long term, you'll move closer to honest conversations and feel empowered.) Myth 4: The other person might not like you anymore. (If she likes you because you don't speak your truth, it's not you she really likes.) Myth 5: If you ignore the issue, it will go away. (Left unaddressed, the conflict will likely grow in intensity.) — Neha Sangwan

To give yourself over to an evil is, in some measure, to pretend that what you know is wrong is right, and then, to justify yourself, you must give yourself over to it all the more. — Anthony M. Esolen

Once a person has been poisoned by self-deception, he can't make decisions about himself as neatly as all that," Himiko said, elaborating her friend's terrific prophecy; " You won't get a divorce Bird. You'll justify yourself like crazy, and try to salvage your married life by confusing the real issues. A decision like divorce is beyond you now, Bird, the poison has gone to work. And you know how the story ends ? Not even your own wife will trust you absolutely, and one day you'll discover for yourself that your entire private life is in the shadow of deception and in the end you'll destroy yourself. Bird, the first signs of self-destruction have appeared already!"
" But that's a blind alley! Leave it to you to paint the most hopeless future you can think of. " Bird lunged at jocularity ... — Kenzaburo Oe

I think love is sort of a con you play on yourself. I think the whole conception of love is something the previous generation invents to justify having created you. You know I think the real reason children are born is because parents are so bored they have children to amuse themselves. They're so bored they don't have anything else to do so they have a child because that will keep them busy for a while. Then to justify to the kid the reason he exists they tell him there's such a thing as love and that's where you come from because me and your daddy or me and your mommy were in love and that's why you exist. When actually it was because they were bored out of their minds. — Richard Hell

There may be hostility and ambivalence, there may even be no responses and those are the worst because it means people do not care. Yet all of these are part of the parcel of land that we call human experience and spirituality. The deep lows and pinnacled heights as well as the wonderful things in what one priest called the lowlands of mundania. This book is not for you if you are looking for hatred on atheists, religionists or just looking for reasons to justify yourself. — Leviak B. Kelly

As soon as a person indicates that they are willing to absorb guilt, a manipulator will stick to that person like glue and feed on their energy. This dynamic can be avoided simply by refusing to take on feelings of guilt. You do not have to justify yourself to anyone and you do not owe anybody anything. If you are to blame for something then you can accept the punishment, as long as you do not get stuck in the position of the guilty party afterwards. You do not owe those close to you anything either; after all, you care about them because you love them not because you have been coerced into doing so. This is a completely different matter. If you have a tendency to justify yourself, start letting go of it; once manipulative individuals realize they no longer have a way of hooking into your energy they will leave you alone. Guilt goes — Vadim Zeland

Anger is a consuming thing, a burning takeover.
It sets up shop in your heart and head and murders anything else attempting to makes it way in. Life becomes obsessed with it, clouded with it, engrossed in it. You justify feeling with delusions that you're owed retribution. You condone thoughts and vengeful acts, feeding yourself with the idea that it's warranted.
But that nourishment comes at a price. It costs you pieces of your soul, your love, your worth. You disregard your beliefs, your conscience. You adopt apathy like it's salvation because you know in your heart of hearts that you would deteriorate into nothing without it. Because you don't want to let it go. It makes you feel powerful, that anger. It makes you feel important. So you will let it eat you alive, consume every part of you until all that's left is hollow revenge. — Fisher Amelie

You must all know half a dozen people at least who are no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can't justify your existence, if you're not pulling your weight in the social boat, if you're not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can't be of very much use to yourself. — George Bernard Shaw

Your own barometer is all you have to go by, and often what makes a good director is knowing when not to say something. On occasions you can find yourself on a film set where the person who is wearing the director's hat is only trying to justify his position. — Gary Oldman

You feign guilt in order to justify yourself. — Jean Racine

Quit being so hard on yourself. We are what we are; we love what we love. We don't need to justify it to anyone ... not even to ourselves. — Scott Lynch