Taking Personally Quotes & Sayings

If I stay, they'll kill me ... If I go, at least everything that wants me dead won't be taking it personally. — Jim Butcher

Teddy looked at him directly for the first time.
Are you a poet?' he asked.
A poet?' Nicholson said. 'Lord, no. Alas, no. Why do you ask?'
I don't know. Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions.' "
- Teddy and Nicholson in "Teddy" (Nine Stories) — J.D. Salinger

I, personally, think there is a really danger of taking food too seriously. Food should be part of the bigger picture. — Anthony Bourdain

True, we can learn much from observation of the failure of others without having to personally suffer the same pain, but the character and memory of the wisdom gained may be more acute and long-lasting from our own personal failures. Even worse is the generational fear of failure prevalent in our culture, resulting from parents carefully programming their offspring as young as three to participate in activities intended to cultivate intellectual and sports prowess which in their design do not allow for failure. Before children can feel the pain of their mistakes, the parents intervene and deflect the taking of personal responsibility by the child. We pay for it so they do not have to. This is the most dangerous thing we can do for them. — Kevin R. Anderson

When someone is cruel, harsh, mean, to not take their words personally is one thing, but to hear the silent cry within those words is another. This sort of perspective can not only liberate us from crippling self-doubt in the face of criticism, it can also liberate us from automatically becoming blind participants in the interaction patterns that the cruel person has become accustomed to - a favour we do for the other person as much as for ourselves. — Vironika Tugaleva

There is nothing that I, personally, can do, except be there. At my family's suggestion I begin taking my little six-pound electronic typewriter with me so that I can write while Hugh is napping. This helps. For, like most of us, I feel frustrated when a situation arises where I am totally helpless, where there is nothing I can do to make anything better. I can, I hope, help Hugh a little by my presence, by the touch of my hand. But there is nothing specifically for me to do. And I think of a friend who has a coffee mug with the inscription: DON'T JUST DO SOMETHING. STAND THERE. — Madeleine L'Engle

Personally, I do not see in Canada it would be a feasible thing if any Ministry organized taking over both the Health and the Disease of the entire community ... even in the most favourable circumstances ... there would be that absence of competition and that sense of independence ... I do not believe it would be good for the profession or good for the Public. — William Osler

For me, at least, studying my subjects first and knowing them personally was essential to taking a good picture. — Gisele Freund

We don't have to take things so personally. We take things to heart that we have no business taking to heart. For instance, saying "If you loved me you wouldn't drink" to an alcoholic makes as much sense as saying "If you loved me, you wouldn't cough" to someone who has pneumonia. Pneumonia victims will cough until they get appropriate treatment for their illness. Alcoholics will drink until they get the same. When people with a compulsive disorder do whatever it is they are compelled to do, they are not saying they don't love you - they are saying they don't love themselves. — Melody Beattie

'Activate Your Goodness' explains how we all have a stake in our collective future, each and every person in their own unique way. As I see it, it is all about personally taking responsibility for our actions, and fully realizing that by thinking good, speaking good and doing good, you can find your place in life. — Shari Arison

Empathizing with someone's 'no' protects us from taking it personally. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

It's basically taking a 911 call, bringing them on stage and dealing with it just like when I was a Chicago policeman for 12 years. I personally become involved. Where Jerry lets people tell their story and lets everything happen on stage, I kind of go after the bad guy and protect the little guy. — Steve Wilkos

Miles's pause had lasted just a little too long. Genially taking his turn to fill it, Illyan turned to Ekaterin. "Speaking of weddings, Madame Vorsoisson, how long has Miles been courting you? Have you awarded him a date yet? Personally, I think you ought to string him along and make him work for it." A chill flush plunged to the pit of Miles's stomach. Alys bit her lip. Even Galeni winced. Olivia looked up in confusion. "I thought we weren't supposed to mention that yet." Kou, next to her, muttered, "Hush, lovie." Lord Dono, with malicious Vorrutyer innocence, turned to her and inquired, "What weren't we supposed to mention?" "Oh, but if Captain Illyan said it, it must be all right," Olivia concluded. Captain Illyan had his brains blown out last year, thought Miles. He is not all right. All right is precisely what he is not . . . Her gaze crossed Miles's. "Or maybe . . ." Not, Miles finished silently for her. Ekaterin — Lois McMaster Bujold

Do you suppose we can take that as evidence? We could cut out the sections."
Jonas snorted, "You can try taking a saw to that house, but personally, I'm not about to get anywhere near it with anything resembling a weapon. — Christine Feehan

I don't know what has caused this reawakening in academia. Obama? The GOP's assaults on science and on patients? Jon Stewart? I'm not at all sure. I just know I don't feel nearly as alone in academia as I used to. I'm feeling increasingly surrounded by fellow Ph.D.'s and by M.D.'s who seem to be taking a lot of things personally. — Alice Dreger

Don't take anything personally because by taking things personally you set yourself up to suffer for nothing. — Miguel Ruiz

Saul took their fear of the Philistines personally. Rejection always takes things personally, becoming defensive, and thus never allows us to see or hear things properly. Remember, the most commons signs of rejection are being defensive and taking things personally. — Anthony Hulsebus

Personally, I don't take holidays; I go on trips. My idea of relaxing is taking a trip that isn't commissioned. I'll work just as hard, but without that nagging pressure of fulfilling a commission. Now that's what I call a holiday. — Martin Parr

Kuan Yin Speaks on Reincarnation: Beliefs are so powerful that they can create expansive or entrapping lifetimes over and over ... Another life offers another opportunity, a chance to switch flavors so to speak. Taking oneself too personally, however, can cause a soul to get caught up, stuck in redundancy: in a particular (and perhaps unfortunate) flavor. In such instances, the individual is forgetting one has the ability to choose from a variety of flavors, lives! — Hope Bradford

And then came Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, a new book by conservative author Peter Schweizer, which documents a long series of large financial transactions conducted between the Clinton Foundation and supplicants seeking favors from the State Department while she was Secretary of State from 2009-2012. The book, whose author is currently being pilloried as a partisan hack by the usual parade of Clinton's minions but the allegations in which are largely untouched as to their substance and veracity, more or less establishes a pattern of bribe-taking by the Clintons from foreign governments and connected players and marks her as perhaps the most personally corrupt plutocrat ever to seek the office of the presidency. — Anonymous

In the heat of leadership, with the adrenaline pumping, it is easy to convince yourself that you are not subject to the normal human frailties that can defeat ordinary mortals. You begin to act as if you are indestructible. But the intellectual, physical, and emotional challenges of leadership are fierce. So, in addition to getting on the being and assess the tolls those changes are taking. If you don't, your seemingly indestructible self can self-destruct. This, by the way, is an ideal outcome for your foes-and even friends who oppose your initiative- because no one has to feel responsible for your downfall.
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When you take "personal" attacks personally, you unwittingly conspire in one of the common ways you can be taken out of action-you make yourself the issue.
Attacks may be personal, understand that they are basically attacks on positions you represent and the role you are seeking to play — Ronald A. Heifetz

I have found great power in taking my 'difference' out for a spin in a very public way. And usually, the worst, most personally embarrassing thing you imagine in your mind is often not anywhere near as bad in real life. — Aimee Mullins

You know, Jean's slapped me out of a lot of moods like the one you're in right now." Locke took a long pull on his beer. "You're taking the world awfully personally. Didn't Chains ever tell you about the Golden Theological Principle?" "The what?" "The single congruent aspect of every known religion. The one shared, universal assumption about the human condition." "What is it?" "He said that life boils down to standing in line to get shit dropped on your head. Everyone's got a place in the queue, you can't get out of it, and just when you start to congratulate yourself on surviving your dose of shit, you discover that the line is actually circular." "I'm just old enough to find that distressingly accurate. — Scott Lynch

imagine there's no heaven..." he said. "Apparently someone is taking that personally. — E.J. Copperman

I think the relationship is very tenuous between fashion and art. Many designers have built relationships with artists, which is not something I personally did. But it's true, sometimes you see artists working for a designer or a brand on some specific project or taking care of their environment and making an amazing store. — Olivier Theyskens

And then the work bears a strong sense of leave-taking for me personally. It ends the work I began in the 1960s (paintings from black-and-white photographs), with a compressed summation that precludes any possible continuation. And so it is a leave-taking from thoughts and feelings of my own on a very basic level. Not that this is a deliberate act, of course; it is a quasi-automatic sequence of disintegration and reformation which I can perceive, as always, only in retrospect. — Gerhard Richter

What I personally knew about courting women could comfortably fit into a thimble without taking it off your finger first. — Patrick Rothfuss

I crunch the assigned reading in my shaking hand, an article titled "Dan Quayle was right." It argued that children raised by single moms were destined for failure. Joined by my fellow students, we argue that our lives are not limited by our absent fathers. The teacher laughs awkwardly and backs away from our arguments. "For God's sake, don't take it personally." The cardinal sin of women and oppressed people everywhere: taking their lives personally.

- S.A. Williams — Erin Passons

As you make a habit of not taking anything personally, you won't need to place your trust in what others do or say. You will only need to trust yourself to make responsible choices. You are never responsible for the actions of others; you are only responsible for you. When you truly understand this, and refuse to take things personally, you can hardly be hurt by the careless comments or actions of others. — Miguel Ruiz

My conclusion from this brief survey of the evidence is that Jesus believed himself called to act as the new Temple. When people were in his presence, it was as if they were in the Temple. But if the Temple was itself the greatest of Israel's incarnational symbols, the conclusion was inevitable (though the cryptic nature of Jesus' actions meant that people only gradually realized what he had in mind): Jesus was claiming, at least implicitly, to be the place where and the means by which Israel's God was at last personally present to and with his people. Jesus was taking the huge risk of acting as if he were the Shekinah in person, the presence of YHWH tabernacling with his people. — N. T. Wright

The only thing worse than taking things personally is being told you take things personally. And how am I supposed to take things, if you please? Why bother talking to anyone at all if you are not supposed to consider anything that is said to be at all personal? — Meg Howrey

as long as you can give people the freedom to disagree, reject, dislike, and oppose you without taking it personally or allowing it to weaken your resolve, you will tap into a new source of power that few men ever realize in their lifetime. I — Bruce Bryans

What causes you to be trapped is what we call personal importance. Personal importance, or taking things personally, is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about me. — Miguel Ruiz

Poets are always taking the weather so personally. They're always sticking their emotions in things that have no emotions. — J.D. Salinger

We often add to our pain and suffering by being overly sensitive, over-reacting to minor things, and sometimes taking things too personally. — Dalai Lama

Taking things personally makes you easy prey for these predators, the black magicians. They can hook you easily with one little opinion and feed you whatever poison they want, and because you take it personally, you eat it up. You eat all their emotional garbage, and now it becomes your garbage. But if you do not take it personally, you are immune in the middle of hell. Immunity to poison in the middle of hell is the gift of this agreement. — Miguel Ruiz

Not taking criticism of your writing personally is an enormous step towards surviving the studio system. — Robert Ben Garant

But it wasn't us, personally, who trashed the world," says Mo. "It was the system. We couldn't change it."
"Then it's not us, personally, taking your panels," says Hood. "It's the system. We can't change it. — David Mitchell

All of the sadness and drama you have lived in your life was rooted in the making of assumptions and taking things personally. The whole world of control between humans is based on that. — Miguel Angel Ruiz

It's about not taking things personally. Even when you feel the world is crumbling around you. It's about choosing happiness over suffering. It's about retraining the way we think. — Laura Munson

Twentysomethings take these difficult moments particularly hard. Compared to older adults, they find negative information - the bad news - more memorable than positive information - or the good news. MRI studies show that twentysomething brains simply react more strongly to negative information than do the brains of older adults. There is more activity in the amygdala - the seat of the emotional brain. When twentysomethings have their competence criticized, they become anxious and angry. They are tempted to march in and take action. They generate negative feelings toward others and obsess about the why: "Why did my boss say that? Why doesn't my boss like me?" Taking work so intensely personally can make a forty-hour workweek long indeed. — Meg Jay

You end up with a machine which knows that by its mildest estimate it must have terrible enemies all around and within it, but it can't find them. It therefore deduces that they are well-concealed and expert, likely professional agitators and terrorists. Thus, more stringent and probing methods are called for. Those who transgress in the slightest, or of whom even small suspicions are harboured, must be treated as terrible foes. A lot of rather ordinary people will get repeatedly investigated with increasing severity until the Government Machine either finds enemies or someone very high up indeed personally turns the tide ... And these people under the microscope are in fact just taking up space in the machine's numerical model. In short, innocent people are treated as hellish fiends of ingenuity and bile because there's a gap in the numbers. — Nick Harkaway

Rather than reacting with our usual attachment or aversion, taking everything personally and feeling the need to do something about it, we relax into the experience, seeing it clearly and letting it be as it is. — Noah Levine

The girls would always tell me not to take things personally, but I never believed there was any other way of taking it. — Melina Marchetta

Amitai shook his head, almost smiling, because here he was, feeling for the first time that the tragedy of European Jewry did belong to him. Before today, his lack of personal connection to the Holocaust had made it a distant history, no more relevant to him than any other. But Natalie, the locket, the painting, the Hall of Names, taking responsibility for Komlos in the Pages of Testimony, these had brought him to he realization that, merely by virtue of being a Jew, even a Jew from another place and time, it was his history, too. Not personally, but collectively. It belonged to him, as he belonged to all those Jews rising up into the infinite ceiling in the Hall of Names. He and Natalie were in the same place, but they had come from different directions. — Ayelet Waldman

Real quality means making sure that people are proud of the code they write, that they're involved and taking it personally. — Linus Torvalds

Making assumptions and then taking them personally is the beginning of hell in this world. Almost all of our conflicts are based on this, and it's easy to understand why. Assumptions are nothing more than lies that we are telling ourselves. This creates a big drama for nothing, because we don't really know if something is true or not. Making assumptions is just looking for drama when there's no drama happening. And if drama is happening in someone else's story, so what? It's not your story; it's someone else's story. — Miguel Ruiz

I look at modern life and I see people not taking responsibility for their lives. The temptation to blame, to find external causes to one's own issues is something that is particularly modern. I know that personally I find that sense of responsibility interesting. — Edward Zwick

Though we were forbidden to speak anything but French, the teacher would occasionally use us to practice any of her five fluent languages.
"I hate you," she said to me one afternoon. Her English was flawless. "I really, really hate you." Call me sensitive, but I couldn't help taking it personally. — David Sedaris

Another common peculiarity of hysterics, namely, that of taking everything personally, of never being able to remain objective, and of allowing themselves to be carried away by momentary impressions; this again shows the characteristics of the enhanced object-libido. — C. G. Jung

I specialise in taking teams of designers, psychologists, usability experts, sociologists and ethnographers into the field. It's called 'corporate anthropology,' but personally I'm more comfortable with 'design research,' because I'm not an anthropologist by training. — Jan Chipchase

When we really see other people as they are without taking it personally, we can never be hurt by what they say or do. Even if others lie to you, it is okay. They are lying to you because they are afraid. They are afraid you will discover that they are not perfect. — Miguel Ruiz

People love to judge, get used to it and stop taking it personally. — Kathryn Budig

Women are repeatedly accused of taking things personally. I cannot see any other honest way of taking them. — Marya Mannes

Demanding recognition for something you did and getting angry or upset if you don't get it; trying to get attention by talking about your problems, the story of your illnesses, or making a scene; giving your opinion when nobody has asked for it and it makes no difference to the situation; being more concerned with how the other person sees you than with the other person, which is to say, using other people for egoic reflection or as ego enhancers; trying to make an impression on others through possessions, knowledge, good looks, status, physical strength, and so on; bringing about temporary ego inflation through angry reaction against something or someone; taking things personally, feeling offended; making yourself right and others wrong through futile mental or verbal complaining; wanting to be seen, or to appear important. — Eckhart Tolle

Doing projects really gives people self-confidence. Nothing is better than taking the pie out of the oven. What it does for you personally, and for your family's idea of you, is something you can't buy. — Martha Stewart

If and when I do get "down," the last thing on my mind is writing a song. Usually, being bummed just involves lying around on the couch and taking the bad weather personally. I only write songs when I feel good - or at least something approaching "good." — Wooden Wand

On 11 September 2012 crowds of friendly locals in Kabul, Afghanistan, were chanting the usual 'Death to America' slogans. At the same time American flags were torched from London to Sydney. And in Benghazi, Libya, a group of 'spontaneous protesters' arrived at the US consulate with rocket-propelled grenades and savagely murdered the US ambassador. In Washington, members of the Obama administration were, as we have already seen, showing that they weren't taking any of this personally. It wasn't about them and it certainly wasn't about their ambassador, who had in fact been murdered by terrorists in a pre-planned attack. The administration was still claiming all this was caused by an excerpt from an amateur film which had been up on YouTube for weeks. — Douglas Murray

You can never take anything personally. Just a story. It's not their fault they want to kick you and it's certainly not yours. It's just the way things are. Sometimes you need to hear the worst, so you have no fear in what you do and learn to work around the what-have-you. — Initially NO