Quotes & Sayings About Self Advancement

Those who are successfully to lead their fellow-men, should have once possessed the nobler feelings. We have all known individuals whose magnanimity was not likely to be troublesome on any occasion; but then they betrayed their own interests by unwisely omitting the consideration, that such feelings might exist in the breasts of those whom they had to guide and govern: for they themselves cannot even remember the time when in their eyes justice appeared preferable to expediency, the happiness of others to self-interest, or the welfare of a State to the advancement of a party. — Arthur Helps

It is not what I do that matters, but what a sovereign God chooses to do through me. God does not want worldly successes, He wants me. He wants my heart in submission to Him. Life is not just a few years to spend on self indulgence and career advancement. It is a privilege, a responsibility, a stewardship to be lived according to a much higher calling, God's calling. This alone gives true meaning to life. — Elizabeth Dole

As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement. — Naomi Wolf

A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement-in a word, with more renunciation than you care for-and so you flee the contagion. — Victor Hugo

A rat race is for rats. We're not rats. We're human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. — Jimmy Reid

We may live in concrete nests piled on top of each other, we may file in and out of our planes and freeways in neat lines, but we are making it all up as we go along. An ant is born into a complex chemical environment where every small instruction had been laid down in advance. Mother tells the workers what to do and they do everything for the greater good of their enormous family.
In contrast, every human being is capable of working for the advancement of their own procreating, their own minuscule families. Yet we somehow recognize the value of a larger form of society, and readily respond to a larger world beyond our own narrow self-interests. With our unique creative capacity, we have modified ourselves as we have modified our physical conditions, and we have developed an extraordinary division of labor. You and I may be as different as night and day, but that is our strength, and it is precisely this diversification that makes my time in Africa so intensely satisfying. — Craig Packer

I am firmly convinced, as I have already said, that to effect any great social improvement, it is sympathy rather than self-interest, the sense of duty rather than the desire for self-advancement, that must be appealed to. Envy is akin to admiration, and it is the admiration that the rich and powerful excite which secures the perpetuation of aristocracies. — Henry George

The wish to be super-strong is a healthy wish, a vital, compelling, power-producing desire. The more the Superman-Wonder Woman picture stories build up this inner compulsion by stimulating the child's natural longing to battle and overcome obstacles, particularly evil ones, the better chance your child has for self-advancement in the world. — William Moulton Marston

It is also worth noting that it was only through my urgent instigation that he printed a short poem of his own. This was in accordance with his essential unassumingness. Though not clearly conscious of it at the time, I now realize that in a young man of twnty-four his selflessness was extraordinary. The clue to his poetic genius was sympathy, not only in his detached outlook upon humanity but in all his actions and responses towards individuals. I can remember nothing in my observations of his character which showed any sign of egotism or desire for self-advancement. When contrasting the two of us, I find that - highly strung and emotional though he was - his whole personality was far more compact and coherent than mine. He readily recognized and appreciated this contrast, and I remember with affection his amused acceptance of my exclamatory enthusiasms and intolerances. Most unfairly to himself, he even likened us to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza! — Siegfried Sassoon

In an age when young people are encouraged to maximize self-interest and self-advancement, the grounds for altruism or even good behavior become obscured. Short of reverting to religious authority - itself on occasion corrosive of secular institutions - what can furnish a younger generation with a sense of purpose beyond its own short-term advantage? — Tony Judt

In the background lurks the scourge of international terrorism. There are people exercising power in a few countries and leading political factions in others who seem to be moved by narrow, brutal and irrational impulses. Their view of their own self-interest is so blinkered as to leave no space for purely human values, for peaceful negotiation or for economic advancement. They are bent on the destruction of the established order and of civilised ways of doing business. They must never be allowed to succeed. — Margaret Thatcher

I have characterized Nixon as a loner, a cold man with great self-confidence and a one-track mind centered on the advancement of Richard Nixon. — Barry Goldwater

Our return to an image-based culture means the destruction of the abstract thought made possible by a literate, print-based society. Image-based societies do not grasp or cope with ambiguity, nuance, doubt and the many layers of irrational motives and urges, some of them frightening, that make human actions complex and finally unfathomable. They eschew self-criticism for amusement. They build fantastic non-reality-based belief systems that cater to human desires and illusions rather than human reality. These illusions, whether religious or secular, offer a simple and unexamined myth that the human race is advancing morally, spiritually and materially toward paradise. This advance is proclaimed as inevitable. This faith in our advancement makes us passive and complacent. — Chris Hedges

Contemporary culture encourages us to make islands of ourselves for the sake of self-fulfillment, of career advancement, of entertainment, of diversion, and all the demands of the sovereign self. When suffering and death come for you--and it will--you want to be in a place where you know, and are known. You want--no, you need--to be able to say, as Mike did, "We're leaning, but we're leaning on each other. — Rod Dreher

Richard Nixon is very much a self-made man in the six years prior to his emergence as a national figure. Between the moment he's elected to Congress in 1946 and the moment he's inaugurated as Vice President in 1953, he conducts nothing less than a kind of prodigy of American political self-advancement. — Roger Morris

When the excessively shy force themselves to be forward, they are frequently surprisingly unsubtle and overdirect and even rude: they have entered an extreme region beyond their normal personality, an area of social crime where gradations don't count; unavailable to them are the instincts and taboos that booming extroverts, who know the territory of self-advancement far better, can rely on. — Nicholson Baker

Since we human beings are the cause of the environmental problems that we face today, we can also be the solution. We just need a shift in our thinking. We just need to move away from the paradigm of competition and domination. Then this world will not end. In fact, the world will prosper and return to its original place as the cradle of self-discovery and the advancement of human spirituality. And such a world is a true democracy. — Seung Heun Lee

If no sing, all youth condemned into poverty. Denied possible advancement and self-realization — Chuck Palahniuk

The road to spiritual enlightenment is an individual experience. The spiritual leader, guru, master or teacher is only a portion of that journey. Eventually, one must "leave the nest" so that they are not limited by the master/student relationship. True advancement begins when the student gains confidence as a practitioner of self-awareness. This can only be done without the constraints of another's journey, such as the master or teacher. — Gary Hopkins

Understanding who you are is critical for your career advancement. Self-awareness helps you get ahead. — Bonnie Marcus

If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement, the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or - like Boris - is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name? It's — Donna Tartt

The ego is definitely an advancement, but it can be compared to the bark of the tree in many ways. The bark of the tree is flexible, extremely vibrant, and grows with the growth beneath. It is a tree's contact with the outer world, the tree's interpreter, and to some degree the tree's companion. So should man's ego be. When man's ego turns instead into a shell, when instead of interpreting outside conditions it reacts too violently against them, then it hardens, becomes an imprisoning form that begins to snuff out important data, and to keep enlarging information from the inner self. The purpose of the ego is protective. It is also a device to enable the inner self to inhabit the physical plane. It is in other words a camouflage. It is the — Jane Roberts

James says, "You desire and do not have; so you kill" (Jas. 4:2). We kill marriages and we kill unborn babies because they cut across our desires; they stand in the way of our unencumbered self-enhancement. And we live in a culture where self-enhancement and self-advancement is god. And if self-enhancement is god, then the One who is at work in the womb shaping a person in His own image is not God and the assault on His work is not sacrilegious, but obedience to the god of self. — John Piper

Where the establishment emphasized humility, prudence, lineage, meritocracy celebrates ambition, achievement, brains&self-betterment — Christopher Hayes

The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence. — Eric Hoffer

In the cause of self-advancement, we are urged to sacrifice our leisure, our pleasures and our time with partners and children, to climb over the bodies of our rivals and to set ourselves against the common interests of humankind. And then? We discover that we have achieved no greater satisfaction than that with which we began. In 1653, Izaak Walton described in the Compleat Angler the fate of "poor-rich men", who "spend all their time first in getting, and next in anxious care to keep it; men that are condemned to be rich, and then always busie or discontented". Today this fate is confused with salvation. — Anonymous

We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment. — C.S. Lewis

Those who speak of progression but are afraid of change are self-repressed and therefore unable to reach any further than their eyes can already see. — Criss Jami

The next Post brought a reply from the starets, who wrote to him that the cause of all his trouble lay in his pride. His Wrathful Outburst, the starets explained, had come about because it was not for God that he had humbled himself, rejecting honours and advancement in the church - not for God, but to satisfy his own pride, to be able to tell himself how virtuous he was, seeking nothing for self. That was why he had not been able to endure the Superior's conduct. Because he felt that he had given up everything for God, and now he was being put on display, like some strange beast.
If it were for God you had given up advancement, you would have let it pass.
worldly pride is still alive in you. — Leo Tolstoy

A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation. — Eric Hoffer

I must break out ...
... start a new life ...
been here for years ...
might be getting into a rut ...
something a bit more exciting ...
more adventurous ...
something with more of a challenge ...
There's not much opportunity for self-advancement in toilets ... — Raymond Briggs