Self Managed Quotes & Sayings

The children were watched through a one-way mirror, and the film that shows their behavior during the waiting time always has the audience roaring in laughter. About half the children managed the feat of waiting for 15 minutes, mainly by keeping their attention away from the tempting reward. Ten or fifteen years later, a large gap had opened between those who had resisted temptation and those who had not. The resisters had higher measures of executive control in cognitive tasks, and especially the ability to reallocate their attention effectively. As young adults, they were less likely to take drugs. A significant difference in intellectual aptitude emerged: the children who had shown more self-control as four-year-olds had substantially higher scores on tests of intelligence. — Daniel Kahneman

[...] let us note that a so-called "Sociobiologist" - this word is a whole project by itself - pushed the ingeniosity to the point of replacing matter by "genes", whose egoist selfishness, combined with ant and bee instincts, would have managed to constitute not only bodies but also conscience and at the end, human intelligence, miraculously able to dissert on the genes that amusingly created it. — Frithjof Schuon

I had finally managed to move the game back to my table, where I knew the rules and the odds, and I had stupidly allowed myself to see just one tiny glimmer of light at the end of the long dark tunnel. And then with a terrible self-satisfied smirk, Life had come breezing in and blown out all the candles again. — Jeff Lindsay

I will keep an eye on Diatribe, with her big talk and heroic gestures, to see with what force she will bring down my Achilles, when hitherto she has never managed to hit a common soldier, not even a Thersites, but she has shot her miserable self to pieces with her own weapons. — Martin Luther

I'm already a monster!" she shrieked.
"No, you're not!" Tom managed to heave himself to his knees. "You're my friend!" he shouted. — Philip Reeve

He doesn't understand why Harry is doing this to him, why Harry is trying to pull him apart. He doesn't understand how Harry has seen past his carefully crafted display. Louis has got smoke and mirrors down to a science, he knows how to deflect and he knows how to act and he's managed to keep people at arms length so nobody would ever question how the magic works. He's got his relationship with Zayn and Liam down to an art, how to give enough so that he doesn't have to lie to them, but able to keep them from knowing how close he is to the edge. Yet here is Harry, ready to unravel everything Louis has sewn together. — Tothemoonmydear

When I look back on the years of excessive self-doubt, I wonder how I was able to make my paintings. In part, I managed to paint because I had a desire, as strong as the desire for food and sex, to push through, to make an image that signified. — Miriam Schapiro

Human cultures are all experiments in trying to find a form that will fit the matter of our immediacy; but it is absolutely not the case that all such experiments are of equal merit or value. Some cultures - and modernity is patently one - have managed to transmute consciousness into the "disease" that Nietzsche called it, the self-affliction of a self-centeredness that has purged itself of all vestiges of wisdom and value. — Kenny Smith

You're wrong."
"I am?"
"I thought things through this time around. I even managed to restrain myself."
Theo stared at her, incredulous. "You did."
"I thought about kicking him in the balls, but I didn't. I figured that would be over kill." - Rendezvous with Destiny — Jess Schira

It's like that, isn't it? Just as Raymond Chandler says, 'The first kiss is dynamite, the second is routine and then you take her clothes off,' It had been like that for Alan in his previous affairs, even the extended one he had had with Sybil while Naomi was pregnant. Sure, Alan went on enjoying sex with Sybil, but at a fundamental level his lust for her had died the very first time he felt the shock of her pubic bone against his, and knew that they were now truly welded into one another. Alan was a one-thrust man. Not that he'd ever been exactly promiscuous. Perhaps it would have been better for all concerned if he had been. Rather, his sentiment self-absorption had managed to gild each of these terminal thrusts with enough self-regarding burnish for him to sustain the 'relationships' that legitimised them for months; and in at least two instances, for years. — Will Self

Summers was simply a master explainer, able to deftly boil down the complexities of economic and financial, and to put them in terms the non-expert could understand. He was brilliant at cultivating a sense of control, even as events spun far beyond what could be managed with any certainty. He could will into being the confidence that eluded others, those less self-assured and, maybe sensibly, on humbler terms with the world. — Ron Suskind

In hindsight, I must have been looking for a way to write about Jewishness that somehow managed to minimize irony and self-deprecation. — Zachary Lazar

The notion that religion can actually be something ... attached to progressivism seems so bizarre. But all you have to say is that Abolition wouldn't have happened without it. The way in which African Americans managed to achieve a degree of self-determination was through the church. — Simon Schama

I'm just a kid, Chiron," I said miserably. "What good is one lousy hero against something like Kronos?"
Chiron managed a smile. '"What good is one lousy hero'? Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain said something like that to me once, just before he single-handedly changed the course of your Civil War. — Rick Riordan

We have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? — Ronald Reagan

Yet he had expended much of an inquisitive nature upon random reading. By the sheer force of indiscriminate voracity, he had gleaned a smattering of practically everything, and by means of a trick memory had managed to keep it all straight. — Isaac Asimov

For the academic the rhetorical sense of superiority through the possession of knowledge is essential for facing the daily grind, turning again to the otherwise boring article, braving the students who, fresh as each class may be, will still ask the same questions year after year. Psychological survival is not achieved without effort, and the environment must be managed, knocked about with one's elbows until it takes a shape comfortable to one's sense of self. This is not selfishness, for in reshaping the environment the academic is also reinvigorating the educational process. — Robin Winks

Therefore, since I could count on no continuity of sapient will to carry me through, indeed since all that was certain was that I must suffer repeated loss of same in order to maintain my body's vitality, my only course was to accomplish with what I hoped was the greater puissance of conscious craft what I had already once barely managed to achieve by accident of fate.

Which was to use these periods of conscious lucidity to engrave a mantric tropism upon the presentient levels of my mind with perpetual chanting repetition and diligent meditation, so that even when reason and conscious will had once more fled, my Bloomenkind self would, during periods of enforced floral nirvana, be programmed to follow the yellow, to follow the sun that sooner or later must rise during a cycle of such meditations into its percept sphere.

"Follow the sun, follow the yellow, follow the Yellow Brick Road ... — Norman Spinrad

Awareness, when managed and directed, becomes attention. By turning into attention, awareness becomes localized, and attains a focal point. Because of this feature, attention has the power to direct energy. — Ilchi Lee

The rabbis paled. I'd managed to terrify holy men. Maybe I could beat up a nun for an encore. — Ilona Andrews

Today our nation is in such shambles that it appears that almost anyone could do a better job of execution than the current leaders. The principal problem appears to be a lack of congruency between the president and the people. His goal seems to be a utopian society managed by the government, rather than the free, self-governing society that the founders left us. Americans want to be free, and the president's approval ratings indicate that "we the People" do not agree with his goals. I pray that the next president will have a set of values that matches those of the majority of Americans. I pray that he will use his power to encourage the "can-do" attitude that characterized America's rapid ascent to the pinnacle of the world. — Ben Carson

I'm just kind of lazy and messed up and self-managed - self-mismanaged. — Dan Bejar

Even fans of actively managed funds often concede that most other investors would be better off in index funds. But buoyed by abundant self-confidence, these folks aren't about to give up on actively managed funds themselves. A tad delusional? I think so. Picking the best-performing funds is 'like trying to predict the dice before you roll them down the craps table,' says an investment adviser in Boca Raton, FL. 'I can't do it. The public can't do it.' — Paul Samuelson

Future shackled is when tomorrow is anchored, boxed and managed to maximize the minimizing of uncertainty. — Bill Jensen

We have all been processed on Procrustean beds. At least some of us have managed to hate what they have made of us. Inevitably we see the other as the reflection of the occasion of our own self-division. The others have become installed in our hearts, and we call them ourselves. Each person, not being himself either to himself or the other, just as the other is not himself to himself or to us, in being another for another neither recognizes himself in the other, nor the other in himself. Hence being at least a double absence, haunted by the ghost of his own murdered self, no wonder modern man is addicted to other persons, and the more addicted, the less satisfied, the more lonely. — R.D. Laing

Life's managed, not cured. — Phillip C. McGraw

Nirvana is the extinction of desire and the full awakening that results from this extinction. It is not simply the dissolution of all ego-limits, a quasi-infinite expansion of the ego into an ocean of self-satisfaction and annihilation. This is the last and worst illusion of the ascetic who, having "crossed to the other shore," says to himself with satisfaction: "I have at last crossed to the other shore." He has, of course, crossed nothing. He is still where he was, as broken as ever. He is in the darkness of Avidya. He has only managed to find a pill that produces a spurious light and deadens a little of the pain. — Thomas Merton

To my surprise, Brooke smiled, and I realized that even though two of the other teams had managed to bug their marks' cell phones, the information Tara and I had received might just prove it self to be even more useful.
Take that Chloe! — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I managed to reach a depth of self-loathing that usually takes a night of drinking to achieve. — Anthony Bourdain

As Confucius once said, 'He who does nothing is the one who does nothing.'"
Gabby pondered the words, the furrowed her brow. "did Confucius really say that?"
Sunglasses in place, Stephanie managed the tiniest of shrugs. "No, but who cared? The point is, they handled, and most likely they found some sort of self-satisfaction in their industrious-ness. Who am I to deprive them of that? — Nicholas Sparks

I can't describe it in words, but I can see it in my head, its color, its light, its shapes, and I've managed to synthesize my love for myself by way of many different reasonings and processes, and I've been able to really synthesize my own satisfaction and things that do it for me. They've usually been self-taught, self-instructed, self-refined. So to be with anybody else has to somewhat lie in that comfort zone I've created with myself so well. — John Mayer

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn't have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn't have to be a walk during which you'll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don't find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn't make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be. — Albert Camus

Money by Martin Amis. I read it when I was 15, I read it hundreds of times since then and it always makes me laugh. Amis has managed to create a world that is both funny and abrasive. I'd love to play John Self, the depraved hero, who's without illusions, he created. — Robert Pattinson

A saving grace of the human condition (if I may phrase it like that) is a sense of humor. Many writers and witnesses, guessing the connection between sexual repression and religious fervor, have managed to rescue themselves and others from its deadly grip by the exercise of wit. And much of religion is so laughable on its face that writers from Voltaire to Bertrand Russell to Chapman Cohen have had great fun at its expense. In our own day, the humor of scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan has ridiculed the apparent inability of the creator to know, let alone to understand, what he has created. Gods seem not to know of any animals except the ones tended by their immediate worshippers and seem to be ignorant as well of microbes and the laws of physics. The self-evident man-madeness of religion, as well as its masculine-madeness in respect of religion's universal commitment to male domination, is one of the first things to strike the eye. — Christopher Hitchens

When you hear men talking," said Cornelia, "all they ever do is speak ill of women ... And I don't quite know how they managed to make this law in their favour, or who exactly it was who gave them a greater license to sin than is allowed to us; and if the fault is common to both sexes (as they can hardly deny), why should the blame not be as well? What makes them think they can boast of the same thing that in women brings only shame? — Moderata Fonte

They'd never precisely been friends, but they'd managed to stop the human race from being wiped out by a corporation's self-induced sociopathy and a recovered alien weapon that everyone in human history had mistaken for a moon of Saturn. By that standard, at least, the partnership had been a success. — James S.A. Corey

For the first time, she became vividly aware of how much of her life she had spent with her husband. It had been a period of time utterly devoid of happiness and spontaneity. A time that she'd so far managed to get through only by using up every last reserve of perseverance and consideration. All of it self-inflicted. — Han Kang

The devil did not make me do it. I managed it all by myself. — Wes Fesler

The capitalist workplace is one of the most profoundly undemocratic institutions on the face of the Earth. Workers have no say over decisions affecting them. If workers sat on the board of directors of democratically operated self-managed enterprises, they wouldn't vote for the wildly unequal distribution of profits to benefit a few and for cutbacks for the many. — Richard D. Wolff

In historical fact, all of history's despots, combined, never managed to get things done as well as this rambunctious, self-critical civilization of free and sovereign citizens, who have finally broken free of worshipping a ruling class and begun thinking for themselves. Democracy can seem frustrating and messy at times, but it delivers. — David Brin

I miss my father. I miss my grandfather. I miss my home. And I miss my mother. But the thing is, for almost three years, I managed not to miss any of them. And then I spent that one day with that one girl. One day ... It was like she gave me her whole self, and somehow as a result, I gave her more of myself than I even realized there was to give. But then she was gone. And only after I'd been filled up by her, by that day, did I understand how empty I really was. — Gayle Forman

What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality, and their unpopular, awkward, or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability. They like themselves well enough to believe that they are worthy of, and can win, the goodwill of others if only they have the wherewithal to present themselves with the right degree of patience and imagination. As children, these good communicators must have been blessed with caregivers who knew how to love their charges without demanding that every last thing about them be agreeable and perfect. Such parents would have been able to live with the idea that their offspring might sometimes - for a while, at least - be odd, violent, angry, mean, peculiar, — Alain De Botton

It seems to be the special peculiarity of human beings that they reflect: they think about thinking and know that they know. This, like other feedback systems, may lead to vicious circles and confusions if improperly managed, but self-awareness makes human experience resonant. It imparts that simultaneous "echo" to all that we think and feel as the box of a violin reverberates with the sound of the strings. It gives depth and volume to what would otherwise be shallow and flat. — Alan Watts

Even though I'm an ordinary writer, I too, have trouble when it come to writing along the way. But at least I manage to self-publish my book with no errors (hopefully). Just check out Agatha Christie, an author who also has a learning disability. She managed to be succesful. And I hope that I would be successful as her and Abishek Bachan. — Simi Sunny

To his complete astonishment, he later found himself
offering up a stumbling prayer that the dog would be protected. It was a mo ment in which he felt
a desperate need to believe in a God that shepherded his own creations. But, even praying, he
felt a twinge of self-reproach, and knew he might start mocking his own prayer at any second.
Somehow, though, he managed to ignore his iconoclastic self and went on praying anyway.
Because he wanted the dog, because he needed the dog. — Richard Matheson

No other drug can compete with cannabis for its ability to satisfy the innate yearnings for Archaic boundary dissolution and yet leave intact the structures of ordinary society. If every alcoholic were a pothead, if every crack user were a pothead, if every smoker smoked only cannabis, the social consequences of the 'drug problem' would be transformed. Yet, as a society we are not ready to discuss the possibility of self-managed addictions and the possibility of intelligently choosing the plants we ally ourselves to. In time, and perhaps out of desperation, this will come. — Terence McKenna

Mary fell asleep early, but her dreams were most unpleasant. She was a mouse running across the kitchen floor, and Elizabeth was a sharp-clawed cat waiting silently to pounce. Then she was a wild deer being chased by famished dogs. Elizabeth was a laughing huntsman in black velvet, urging the ravenous pack onward with a whip. And then Mary was her true self, barefoot and in a bedgown, attempting to escape by night. But the castle was dark and the halls were a winding maze. Mary ran down long shadowy corridors, panting and out of breath, but at every turn she ran into blank walls or locked doors. At last she managed to yank open a door, expecting to breathe the sweet air of freedom. But the way was blocked by laughing faces, all of them growing larger and larger while Mary got smaller and smaller. There was Elizabeth ... and Dudley ... and Cecil ... and Walsingham ... and their loud laughter filled her ears, drowning her pleas like ocean waves. — Margaret George

On an individual level, the human condition changed day by day, even hour by hour, and while you were soaking in self-pity over a misfortune, you might miss an opportunity for a redeeming triumph. And for every act of inhumanity, the species managed to committ a hundred acts of kindness; so if you were the type to brood, you would be more sensible if you dwelt on the remarkable goodwill with which most people treated others even in a society where the cultural elites routinely mocked virtue and celebrated brutality.
BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON
Chapter 5 — Dean Koontz

Daisuke was of course equipped with conversation that, even if they went further, would allow him to retreat as if nothing had happened. He had always wondered at the conversations recorded in Western novels, for to him they were too bald, too self indulgent, and moreover, too unsubtly rich. However they read in the original, he thought they reflected a taste that could not be translated into Japanese. Therefore, he had not the slightest intention of using imported phrases to develop his relationship with Michiyo. Between the two of them at least, ordinary words sufficed perfectly well. But the danger was of slipping from point A to point B without realizing it. Daisuke managed to stand his ground only by a hair's breadth. When he left, Michiyo saw him to the entranceway and said, "Do come again, please? It's so lonely. — Soseki Natsume

if you have the right people on the bus, the problem of how to motivate and manage people largely goes away. The right people don't need to be tightly managed or fired up; they will be self-motivated by the inner drive to produce the best results and to be part of creating something great. — James C. Collins

It is not easy to find someone your size once the Freshman Fifteen turns to the Sophomore Forty or the Senior Sixty. Even when, through some miracle of self-restraint and bulimia, college girls managed to continue to have feminine bodies, so many of these tacky sluts have never heard word one about what fashion entails. — Thomm Quackenbush

Don't clock anybody, let them all clock you,
Don't be down with anybody, let them all be down with you.
Stay self-managed, self-kept, self-taught,
Be your own man; don't be borrowed, don't be bought. — Heavy D

Get involved. You don't want to look back on your life and realize that you successfully managed to stay out of it. — Robert Breault

I have managed to establish an identity that is based on my internal self, and for that I feel tremendously lucky. — David Rakoff

Ritual he liked, but compulsory routine he hated. Thus, he resented every minute that he now had to surrender to showering, shampooing, shaving, and flossing and brushing his teeth. If mere men could devise self-defrosting refrigerators and self-cleaning ovens, why couldn't nature, in all its complex, inventive magnificence, have managed to come up with self-cleaning teeth? "There's birth," he grumbled, "there's death, and in between there's maintenance. — Tom Robbins

She was not suicidal; that is what people never managed to grasp. Cutting relieved the pressure and stood as some enduring demonstration of her emotion, some way to be in control of a body that could toss her about with seizures. It was borderline artistic to mark her body, chiaroscuro designs in blood. Dying is the last thing she would want, like any healthy organism. A little pain, a small invoked sting trailing her arm, brought her much closer to grounded when she could not keep her head from racing, her thoughts from consuming her with obsession. An ounce of liquid weight loss and she could go back to being herself again. Usually. — Thomm Quackenbush

Hippies started the ecology movement. They combated racism. They liberated sexual stereotypes, encouraged change, individual pride, and self-confidence. They questioned robot materialism. In four years they managed to stop the Vietnam War. They got marijuana decriminalized in fourteen states during the Carter Administration. — Timothy Leary