Self Liberating Quotes & Sayings

In the long run there is no more liberating, no more exhilarating experience than to determine one's position, state it bravely, and then act boldly. Action brings with it its own courage, its own energy, a growth of self-confidence that can be acquired in no other way — Eleanor Roosevelt

Sometimes it's liberating to confront horrible things in lyrics as a way to master the shadow-self that exists in everyone. — Jeff Tweedy

This reminds me of the place in Genesis 4 where God looks at Cain, who is full of self-pity, and says to him, "Cain, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must master it." What's important to understand is that the principle of self in your life is crouching at your door! It wants to have you, it wants to pounce on you, it wants to devour you. And it's up to you to do something about it. God asks that you deny yourself, that you lose yourself to find yourself. If you try to do this without the work of the Spirit, and without belief in all Christ has done for you, then simply giving up your rights and desires will be galling and hardening. But in Christ and with the Spirit, it will be liberating. — Timothy Keller

Creativity connects me to my truest self and vulnerability. There is nothing more personally liberating, than reaching for my face and peeling off the social mask that hides my; shadow self, pain and weakness. When i produce from this place of truth, the results transform both creator and beholder. — Jaeda DeWalt

Education can become a self-fulfilling activity, liberating in and of itself. — Abraham Maslow

The aim of any practice of concentration and meditation is to free the aspirant from his usual way of thinking, feeling and being, so that he manages to become aware of himself in a manner which is totally different from the way he is normally.
This self-awareness, inaccessible to the seeker in his ordinary state of being, is closely linked with a very special inner presence which is liberating, transforming and therapeutic at the same time. — Edward Salim Michael

Black women ... are trained from childhood to become workers, and expect to be financially self-supporting for most of their lives. They know they will have to work, whether they are married or single; work to them, unlike to white women, is not a liberating goal, but rather an imposed lifelong necessity. — Gerda Lerner

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility, or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law, or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self-improvement. — J.K. Rowling

The liberating encounter with God/ess is always an encounter with our authentic selves resurrected from underneath the alienated self. It is not experienced against, but in and through relationships, healing our broken relations with our bodies, with other people, with nature. — Rosemary Radford Ruether

Realizing your true self apart from the mind-created ego self is profoundly liberating, and when you do, suddenly the universe appears immensely blissful. — Rajeev Kurapati

Self-importance is a trap, because the moment we start to think that we actually matter is the moment when things start to go wrong. The truth is that you are supremely unimportant and nothing matters. All of man's striving is for nothing; all effort is wasted. To realize that everything is meaningless is tremendously liberating, since it then leaves us completely free to create our own lives and ignore the plans that others have for us. — Tom Hodgkinson

There's something liberating about not pretending. Dare to embarrass yourself. Risk. — Drew Barrymore

A mind that is competitive, held in the conflict of becoming, thinking in terms of comparison, is not capable of discovering the real. Thought-feeling which is intensely aware is in the process of constant self-discovery - which discovery, being true, is liberating and creative. Such self-discovery brings about freedom from acquisitiveness and from the complex life of the intellect. It is this complex life of the intellect that finds gratification in addictions: destructive curiosity, speculation, mere knowledge, capacity, gossip, and so on; and these hindrances prevent simplicity of life. An addiction, a specialization gives sharpness to the mind, a means of focusing thought, but it is not the flowering of thought-feeling into reality. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Perhaps the most liberating moment in my life was when I realized that my self-loathing was not a product of my inadequacy but, rather, a product of my thoughts. — Vironika Tugaleva

It is not just one transforming moment of realization and "conversion," though often it begins that way. It is the habitual knowledge that informs each moment of our lives, not as a paralyzing sense of guilt or shame, but as joyous thankfulness; an ever deepening self-knowledge of one's dependency and poverty combined with a liberating wonder; the experience of the depth of our sin, but the even greater immensity of God's saving love. — Pope Francis

The chief means of liberating women is replacing of compulsiveness and compulsion by the pleasure principle. Cooking, clothes, beauty, and housekeeping are all compulsive activities in which the anxiety quotient has long since replaced the pleasure or achievement quotient. It is possible to use even cooking, clothes, cosmetics and housekeeping for fun. The essence of pleasure is spontaneity. In these cases spontaneity means rejecting the norm, the standard that one must live up to, and establishing a self-regulating principle. — Germaine Greer

There's no greater perjury than self-deception. Lying to ourselves puts to death our definitive truth. Confronting the lies we've told ourselves, no matter how small, is a difficult endeavor but nothing is more liberating. To be honest with ourselves is the fastest path to self-acceptance. Being authentic about who we are, actually enriches the relationships around us. The truth sets us free and that's no lie. ~Jason Versey — Jason Versey

THE ACCEPTANCE OF SUFFERING is a journey into death. Facing deep pain, allowing it to be, taking your attention into it, is to enter death consciously. When you have died this death, you realize that there is no death - and there is nothing to fear. Only the ego dies. Imagine a ray of sunlight that has forgotten it is an inseparable part of the sun and deludes itself into believing it has to fight for survival and create and cling to an identity other than the sun. Would the death of this delusion not be incredibly liberating? DO YOU WANT AN EASY DEATH? Would you rather die without pain, without agony? Then die to the past every moment, and let the light of your presence shine away the heavy, time-bound self you thought of as "you. — Eckhart Tolle

O beautiful for spacious skies, ... O beautiful for heroes proved In liberating strife, Who more than self their country loved, And mercy more than life! America! America! May God thy gold refine, Til all success be nobleness And every gain divine! — Katharine Lee Bates

Then I realized that secrecy is actually to the detriment of my own peace of mind and self, and that I could still sustain my belief in privacy and be authentic and transparent at the same time. It was a pretty revelatory moment, and there's been a liberating force that's come from it. — Alanis Morissette

It is essential that our love be liberating, not possessive. We must at all times give those we love the freedom to be themselves. Love affirms the other as other. It does not possess and manipulate another as mine. — John Powell

And in an odd way, realizing all this has given me an unexpected satisfaction and a little more self-respect. I have changed, and it's for the better. You really can't love unconditionally. People can burn and beat love out of you. They really can kill it, and it's not your fault you don't feel it anymore, and how liberating it is to finally realize that. Love isn't for better or for worse, through thick or thin. — Patricia Cornwell

Evolution tells us how to survive; art tells us how it's possible still to live even while knowing that we and all we love will someday vanish. It says there's beauty even in grief, freedom even inside the strictures of form and of life. What's liberating isn't what's simplest; it's the ability to include more and more shadows, colors and possibilities inside any moment's meeting of self and world. — Jane Hirshfield

One of the most liberating things a person can do is to admit that he or she is human and is flawed. — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

When your children are very young it is impossible to imagine a life where they will not live with you, where you will not see them every day or know what they are doing. As they grow up, you gradually untangle your 'self' from their 'selves' until the day arrives when you look at your child and realize the role you play in their life is no longer a central one. It's hard to recognize that your child is independent, but it's also incredibly liberating."
-- from Unlikely Destinations: The Lonely Planet Story — Maureen Wheeler

God loves us by liberating us from the bondage of self so that we can enjoy knowing and admiring him forever. — John Piper

The Agna, liberating instructions of the 'Gnani' [the enlightened one], purifies the mind. Knowledge of the Self [self realization] will give the mind, solutions in every circumstance. — Dada Bhagwan

Obedience makes our heart receptive to what God has already done. It doesn't move Him; His heart is always aflame toward us. Generally, this revelation is not taught correctly by well-meaning ministers. The incorrect way that obedience is taught causes people to be overly-introspective, obsessing over their inadequacies and failures. It breeds SELF-ESTEEM issues instead of promoting CHRIST-ESTEEM wholeness. It breeds a destructive DEMAND-CONSCIOUSNESS (law) instead of a liberating SUPPLY-CONSCIOUSNESS (grace). — Brian Williams

Belief in the liberating power of knowledge has become the ruling illusion of modern humankind. Most want to believe that some kind of explanation or understanding will deliver them from their conflicts. Yet being divided from yourself goes with being self-aware. This is the truth in the Genesis myth: the Fall is not an event at the beginning of history but the intrinsic condition of self-conscious beings. — John Gray

I had a moment when I first got on Supernatural when I was like, "Oh my god, people are paying attention to me, I have fans, maybe I should cultivate an image and try to seem really cool." I had this moment of being commercially self conscious and it took maybe a month for me to realize no, this is not who I ****ing am, and here's a picture of me in drag. Which is, by the way, so much more liberating and relaxing. There's not a more sure fire way to give a stifled, boring, empty, vapid, meaningless interview than trying to say the right thing ... — Misha Collins

No Blame: The most liberating and empowering day of my life was the day I freed myself from my own self-destructive nonsense. — Steve Maraboli

Then there was the realisation that I didn't actually feel that much better when I was thin(ner). In fact the 'thin' version felt worse because I lived with hunger clawing at my stomach all the time, and in fear that I was going to get fat again. After years of neuroticism I'd finally understood those who loved me would continue to put up with me fat or thin, and those who didn't ignored me. As a middle-aged woman I was pretty much invisible anyway. To pass unnoticed through an image-obsessed society is surprisingly liberating. — Helen Brown