Your Own Enemy Quotes & Sayings

With gifts, you may gather your enemies about you. When giving nothing, even your own family will leave. — Sakya Pandita

A good portfolio manager knows which companies to keep and which ones to let go. Many a GP has struggled with portfolio companies that cannot meet their value-creation milestones, or raise additional follow-on rounds of capital, or generate target returns in a time span of, say, five to seven years. The faster you recognize those losses, the better it is."
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"As David Cowan says, "Just focus on your top five - the rest is distraction." The harder part of the investor's discipline is to know when to quit."
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"You have to constantly scan all of those things and be willing to adjust your own sense of what's a reasonable outcome and move the company into a position where it has the maximum chance to succeed. "
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"Time is your enemy: Portfolio companies always take twice as much capital and twice as long to exit. Early-stage companies rarely meet milestones as planned and always burn cash faster than anticipated. — Mahendra Ramsinghani

Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy, if possible; and when you strike and overcome him, never let up in the pursuit so long as your men have strength to follow; for an army routed, if hotly pursued, becomes panic-stricken, and can then be destroyed by half their number. The other rule is, never fight against heavy odds, if by any possible maneuvering you can hurl your own force on only a part, and that the weakest part, of your enemy and crush it. Such tactics will win every time, and a small army may thus destroy a large one in detail, and repeated victory will make it invincible. — Stonewall Jackson

A game you play with your own worst enemy-yourself. — Finley Peter Dunne

In war you see your own troubles; those of the enemy you cannot see. You must show confidence. — Napoleon Bonaparte

The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you, as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the scientific general. Just what the respective enemies want and think, and what they know or do not know, are as hard things for the teachers as for the general to find out. — William James

Although you may spend your life killing, you will not exhaust all your foes. But if you quell your own anger, your real enemy will be slain. — Nagarjuna

Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or "mental movies." Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person's own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. — Eckhart Tolle

Each day look into your conscience and amend your faults; if you fail in this duty you will be untrue to the Knowledge and Reason that are within you. Keep a watchful eye over yourself as if you were your own enemy; for you cannot learn to govern yourself, unless you first learn to govern your own passions and obey the dictates of your conscience. — Khalil Gibran

It takes great strength to compromise, Shahar. More than it does to threaten and destroy, since you must fight your own pride as well as the enemy. — N.K. Jemisin

Real arms races are run by highly intelligent, bespectacled engineers in glass offices thoughtfully designing shiny weapons on modern computers. But there's no thinking in the mud and cold of nature's trenches. At best, weapons thrown together amidst the explosions and confusion of smoky battlefields are tiny variations on old ones, held together by chewing gum. If they don't work, then something else is thrown at the enemy, including the kitchen sink - there's nothing "progressive" about that. At its usual worst, trench warfare is fought by attrition. If the enemy can be stopped or slowed by burning your own bridges and bombing your own radio towers and oil refineries, then away they go. Darwinian trench warfare does not lead to progress - it leads back to the Stone Age. — Michael J. Behe

When you drop bombs on the enemy, you drop those same bombs on yourself, your own country. — Nhat Hanh

Why? Why this unreasonable anger at the sight of others who are happy or content, this growing contempt for people and the desire to hurt them? All right, you think they're fools, you despise them because their morals, their happiness is the source of your frustration and resentment. But these are dreadful enemies you carry within yourself - in time destructive as bullets. Mercifully, a bullet kills its victim. This other bacteria, permitted to age, does not kill a man but leaves in its wake the hulk of a creature torn and twisted; there is still fire within his being but it is kept alive by casting upon it faggots of scorn and hate. He may successfully accumulate, but he does not accumulate success, for he is his own enemy and is kept from truly enjoying his achievements." Perry, — Truman Capote

Fear not, too much, an open enemy; He is consistent
always at his post; But watchful be of him who holds the key Of your own heart, and flatters you the most. — Andrew Jackson Downing

An enemy of innovation could be your own sales force. — Akio Morita

There is something that Governments care for far more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy. Be militant each in your own way. I incite this meeting to rebellion. — Emmeline Pankhurst

Air power and military are meant to fight the enemy and not your own citizens ... How do you differentiate a Maoist? ... It will create a civil war-like situation. — Kishore Chandra Deo

I count myself really fortunate that I have some lifelong friends. The best thing about a friend is when you are being your own worst enemy a friend can help snap you out of it. — Amy Grant

As an introvert, you can be your own best friend or your worst enemy. The good news is we generally like our own company, a quality that extroverts often envy. We find comfort in solitude and know how to soothe ourselves. Even our willingness to look at ourselves critically is often helpful.
But, we can go too far. We can hoard responsibility and overlook the role others play. We can kick ourselves when we're down. How many times have you felt lousy about something, only to get mad at yourself for feeling lousy? — Laurie A. Helgoe

The great thing about the British SAS was that they viewed war the same way the American Special Operations community did. You didn't win by thinking inside the box and following someone else's rules. You turned the box upside down and made your own rules, no matter what the enemy threw at you. — Brad Thor

But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes? — Friedrich Nietzsche

You are the cause of your own joy or your own misery. You hold that power. You are your own friend and your own enemy. — Swami Satchidananda

You act as if I were your enemy.
"You are my enemy. You seek to end the things I love."
And is an ending always bad? it asked. Must not all things, even worlds, someday end?
"There is no need to hasten that end," Vin said. "No reason to force it."
All things are subject to their own nature, Vin, Ruin said, seeming to flow around her. She could feel its touch on her - wet and delicate, like mist. You cannot blame me for what I am. Without me, nothing would end. Nothing could end. And therefore, nothing could grow. I am life. Would you fight life itself?
Vin fell silent.
Do not mourn because the day of this world's end has arrived, Ruin said. That end was ordained the very day of the world's conception. There is a beauty in death - the beauty of finality, the beauty of completion.
For nothing is truly complete until the day it is finally destroyed. — Brandon Sanderson

The precepts "Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you" ... are born from the Gospel's profound spirit of individualism, which refuses to let one's own actions and conduct depend in any way on somebody else's acts. The Christian refuses to let his acts be mere reactions - such conduct would lower him to the level of his enemy. The act is to grow organically from the person, "as the fruit from the tree." ... What the Gospel demands is not a reaction which is the reverse of the natural reaction, as if it said: "Because he strikes you on the cheek, tend the other" - but a rejection of all reactive activity, of any participation in common and average ways of acting and standards of judgment. — Max Scheler

If you have to fight old enemies, you should do it with your own old soldiers. — Marius C.

Here we come upon a terrible facet of ethically asymmetric warfare: when your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand. — Sam Harris

If you have small-government, traditional values, you may be considered by your own leadership to be an enemy of the state. — Monica Crowley

One foot in Hell, one in Heaven, but there will always be a devil.
Be he your enemy.
Be he your friend.
Be the devil your own soul for fear of the world. — Michelle Horst

Stay in the boat, I told myself, watching them walk up to the pavilion. I'll just stay in the boat. I won't go anywhere near that creature.
But in spite of that wise warning, I climbed out of the boat.
Fine, stretch your legs, I told myself. Just don't follow them.
But of course, I followed them.
You are without question your own worst enemy, I scolded myself, even as I tiptoed after them. — Merrie Haskell

You are your own best friend or worst enemy ... choose wisely! — Timothy Pina

When he [Christ] says 'Forgive your enemies', it is not for the sake of the enemy but for one's own sake that he says so, and because Love is more beautiful than Hate. — Oscar Wilde

To live for others as a definite self-conscious aim was not his creed. It was not the basis of his creed. When he says, 'Forgive your enemies,' it is not for the sake of the enemy, but for one's own sake that he says so, and because love is more beautiful than hate. In his own entreaty to the young man, 'Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor,' it is not of the state of the poor that he is thinking but of the soul of the young man, the soul that wealth was marring. In his view of life he is one with the artist who knows that by the inevitable law of self-perfection, the poet must sing, and the sculptor think in bronze, and the painter make the world a mirror for his moods, as surely and as certainly as the hawthorn must blossom in spring, and the corn turn to gold at harvest-time, and the moon in her ordered wanderings change from shield to sickle, and from sickle to shield. — Oscar Wilde

Don't attempt to fight the enemy in your own strength. You will experience burnout, and you will fail. Don't even think about it! The key is to engage in spiritual warfare God's way. And that is by resting in him and fighting from victory, not for victory! — Pedro Okoro

Fighting with anybody is dangerous because you become like your enemy. That is one of the greatest problems of humanity. Once you fight with somebody, by and by you have to use the same techniques and the same ways. Then the enemy may be defeated, but by the time he is defeated you have become your own enemy. — Osho

Fight your genes.' The Big Hoom said to us once, to Susan and me. He did not explain. He did not know how to. But we knew what it meant. It meant that we were to march into the hall and take out our school books and reproduce the slipper-shaped animalcule whose psuedopodia power it through a world without feeling; to learn how to inscribe a hexagon into a circle without tearing the paper; to assimilate the causes and consequences of the battle of Panipat without ever identifying your own enemy because that would be mean identifying yourself.
'Fight your genes'. Focus. Be diligent. Concentrate. Do — Jerry Pinto

I just want to feel better. My own body is my deepest enemy. It wants, it wants, it wants and when it does not get, it cries and cries and I punish it. How can you live in fear of your own body? — Kathleen Glasgow

Who's gonna make you happy when you're your own worst enemy? — Matisyahu

You are your own worst enemy. So to enjoy life, tell yourself to sit down, shut up, and hang on, because it's going to be one Hell of a ride! — A.M. Sawyer

I think one important thing that happens in the studio is accepting yourself as the enemy and painting from that point of view. So instead of pointing the finger outward and passing judgment, instead, you start with yourself as your own worst enemy. — Lisa Yuskavage

Your greatest enemy is your own relection — Joanne McClean

(The enemy) laughs at your attempts to fix your own issues with timely words and hard work - tactics that might affect matters for a moment but can't begin to touch his underhanded, cunning efforts down where the root issues lie. — Priscilla Shirer

Tragedy may hit all of us in one way or another, but fate's not our enemy, Brooke. We are. By locking yourself away from the world, you choose your own mistakes and destroy any chance of ever finding happiness. You cannot control life, but you can chose who you are and what you make of it. — J.C. Reed

I don't respect killers, I respect O.G. knowledge,
Codes of the streets got new rules, but no guidance.
Lessons, detrimental to a young disciple;
Folks, take care of your brothers, niggas do as I do.
Keep your enemies close, where they can see you.
It's not your enemy who get you, it's always your own people. — Nas

When it comes to investing, you are your own worst enemy. — Barry Ritholtz

I know now what was happening to me, what was overwhelming me, what was about to consume and almost destroy me. Didier had even given me a name for it - assassin grief, he'd once called it: the kind of grief that lies in wait and attacks you from ambush, with no warning and no mercy. I know now that assassin grief can hide for years and then strike suddenly on the happiest day, without discernible reason or exegesis. But on that day, ... almost a year after Khader's death, I couldn't understand the dark and trembling mood that was moving in me, swelling to the sorrow I'd too long denied. I couldn't understand it, so i tried to fight it as a man fights pain or despair. But you can't bite down on assassin grief and will it away. The enemy stalks you, step for step, and knows your every move before you make it. The enemy is your own grieving heart and, when it strikes, it can't miss. — Gregory David Roberts

If God has given you a mission, you must be tough enough to handle what people say and still not be distracted while doing what you were created to do. Are you tough enough? God and the enemy know the truth about you, and remember even great people doing great things for great causes meet negative criticisms. All criticism is not bad, just like all flattery is not good. Many times people don't criticize you because they are evil; they do it because they have been trained to think anyone who doesn't perceive and see things in the same manner is an enemy. The critic is a prisoner to his own experiences and perspectives, erroneously believing his limited experiences are the sum of all truth. When you acknowledge your critics, you give them your power and validate their words. They are not important until you respond. — Bishop T. D. Jakes

Console yourself not with the lie that your foe is weak, or stupid, or evil. Sometimes the enemy is worthy. Sometimes his cause is just. Sometimes both sides are right in their own ways-and in the hour that just causes collide, good men will rise up and leap into the fray, and the clash of their meeting will shake the heavens. And their blood will flow like rivers. — Holly Lisle

... I agree with two things: the steppe is wide - even though I've never been there, and the mountains, fuck, yes, the mountains are a thing for themselves. They eat you up, swallow you whole, digest and churn around until their loneliness spits you back out again and you think that nothing else matters. Just them, and that tiny handful of life that's your own. Fucking insignificant. Nothing, no one, barely remembered, except perhaps for a moment of recognition in a goddamned teahouse." He shut up, suddenly, had said too much.
Vadim flashed a smile. "You're my favourite enemy, too. Fucking messy Brit. — Aleksandr Voinov

Sometimes the biggest enemy you have is down deep in your own soul. — Chris Fabry

By your own folly you will be brought as low as your worst enemy wishes. — Gautama Buddha

Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You won't! You'll have ... A God, essentially, of your own making, and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction. Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination. So an authoritative Bible is not the enemy of a personal relationship with God. It is the precondition for it. — Timothy Keller

Emotion clouds the rational, and many perspectives guide the full reality. To view current events as a historian is to account for all perspectives, even those of your enemy. It is to know the past and to use such relevant history as a template for expectations. It is, most of all, to force reason ahead of instinct, to refuse to demonize that which you hate, and to, most of all, accept your own fallibility. — R.A. Salvatore

You are your own worst enemy, young lady. And you are a coward. It is senseless to mistake fear for bravery." Her warm breath is yeasty on my face. "I feel sorry for you. But that's it. We are done trying to help you. It's your life, as your poor father said." AFTER THIS, WHEN I wake in the morning, I spread my fingers, working out the stiffness that creeps in overnight. I point my toes, feeling the crimp in my ankles, my calves, the dull sore ache behind my knees. The pain in my joints is like a needy pet that won't leave me alone. But I can't complain. I've forfeited that right. — Christina Baker Kline

Of your own indefatigable labor from early dawn and of your explicit instructions, that the batteries should reserve their ammunition, until the grand charge should commence, for which the enemy were undoubtedly preparing. — John Bigelow

Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate - and quickly. — Robert A. Heinlein

One cannot make command decisions simply by assessing the tactical situation and going ahead with whatever course of action will do the most harm to the enemy with a minimum of death and damage to your own men and materiel. Modern warfare has become very complex, especially during the last century. Wars are won not by a simple series of battles won, but by a complex interrelationship among military victory, economic pressures, logistic maneuvering, access to the enemy's information, political postures - dozens, literally dozens of factors. — Joe Haldeman

You can't just do whatever you feel like." "You can't just do anything you want." "You have to learn self-restraint." "You're only interested in gratifying your desires." "You don't care about anything but your own pleasure." Can you hear the judgmentality in these admonitions? Can you see how they reproduce the mentality of domination that runs our civilization? Goodness comes through conquest. Health comes through conquering bacteria. Agriculture is improved by eliminating pests. Society is made safe by winning the war on crime. On my walk today, students accosted me, asking if I wanted to join the "fight" against pediatric cancer. There are so many fights, crusades, campaigns, so many calls to overcome the enemy by force. No wonder we apply the same strategy to ourselves. Thus it is that the inner devastation of the Western psyche matches exactly the outer devastation it has wreaked upon the planet. Wouldn't you like to be part of a different kind of revolution? — Charles Eisenstein

Remember then that if you think the things which are by nature slavish to be free, and the things which are in the power of others to be your own, you will be hindered, you will lament, you will be disturbed, you will blame both gods and men: but if you think that only which is your own to be your own, and if you think that what is another's, as it really is, belongs to another, no man will ever compel you, no man will hinder you, you will never blame any man, you will accuse no man, you will do nothing involuntarily (against your will), no man will harm you, you will have no enemy, for you will not suffer any harm. If — Epictetus

Beware of turning into the enemy you most fear. All it takes is to lash out violently at someone who has done you some grievous harm, proclaiming that only your pain matters in this world. More than against that person's body, you will then, at that moment, be committing a crime against your own imagination. — Ariel Dorfman

And in a nasty war, where's the best place to be? Apart from on the moon, o' course? No one?"
Slowly, Jade raised a hand.
"Go on, then," said the sergeant.
"In the army, sarge," said the troll. "'cos ... " She began to count on her fingers. "One, you got weapons an' armour an' dat. Two, you are surrounded by other armed men. Er ... Many, youse gettin' paid and gettin' better grub than the people in Civilian Street. Er ... Lots, if'n you gives up, you getting taken pris'ner and dere's rules about that like Not Kicking Pris'ners Inna Head and stuff, 'cos if you kick their pris'ners inna head they'll kick your pris'ners inna head so dat's, like, you're kickin' your own head, but dere's no rule say you can't kick enemy civilians inna head. There's other stuff too, but I ran outa numbers. — Terry Pratchett

The person you call an enemy is an exaggerated aspect of your own shadow self. — Deepak Chopra

Fate didn't stand in the way. Rather, they themselves were their own worst enemies. — Michael R. Fletcher

Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts. Develop the mind of equilibrium. You will always be getting praise and blame, but do not let either affect the poise of the mind: follow the calmness, the absence of pride. — Gautama Buddha

You have to reach out to your inner-abuser and make peace. You can't live your life as your own worst enemy! — Bryant McGill

Be indifferent if you lose your short term clients, remember they are your own worst enemy — Seth Klarman

When one man has been under very remarkable obligations to another, with whom he subsequently quarrels, a common sense of decency, as it were, makes of the former a much severer enemy than a mere stranger would be. To account for your own hard-heartedness and ingratitude in such a case, you are bound to prove the other party's crime. It is not that you are selfish, brutal, and angry at the failure of a speculation
no, no
it is that your partner has led you into it by the basest treachery and with the most sinister motives. From a mere sense of consistency, a persecutor is bound to show that the fallen man is a villain
otherwise he, the persecutor, is a wretch himself. — William Makepeace Thackeray

It's a craving that shouldn't even exist, and yet you can't wish it didn't exist. Once it has hold of you, you can't wish it away, because you'd have to wish your life away, it's so bound up with it, and you can't do that - what good would dying do? Afterward - with pleasure. In her arms - only too gladly. But before? That's nonsense, because life is desire, and desire is life, and life can't be its own enemy. — Thomas Mann

If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know how much truth is stronger than errors, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. — Henry David Thoreau

Discipline is the greatest weapon against the self-righteous. We must measure the virtue of our own controlled response when answering the atrocities of fanatics. And yet, let it not be claimed, in our own oratory of piety, that we are without our own fanatics; for the self-righteous breed wherever tradition holds, and most often when there exists the perception that tradition is under assault. Fanatics can be created as easily in an environment of moral decay (whether real or imagined) as in an environment of legitimate inequity or under the banner of a common cause.
Discipline is as much facing the enemy within as the enemy before you; for without critical judgment, the weapon you wield delivers- and let us not be coy here- naught but murder.
And its first victim is the moral probity of your cause. — Steven Erikson

The obvious signs of a brand gone wrong are the levels of negative headlines it consistently attracts. People talking about you for all the negative and wrong reasons. You begin to shoot yourself in the foot and you have become your own enemy. The gospel about you should be good enough to create relevance and significance - or rather to confirm that. — Archibald Marwizi

The new captain looked up. Oh, good grief, Vimes thought. It's bloody Rust this time round!
And it was indeed the Hon. Ronald Rust, the god's gift to the enemy, any enemy, and a walking encouragement to desertion.
The Rust family had produced great soldiers, by the undemanding standards of 'Deduct your own casualties from those of the enemy, and if the answer is a positive number, it was a glorious victory' school of applied warfare. But Rust's lack of any kind of military grasp was matched only by his high opinion of the talent he in fact possessed only in negative amounts. — Terry Pratchett

All you have to do is get in a closer walk with God and you'll find your enemies are in your own church. — Leonard Ravenhill

If you have done something meritorious, you experience pleasure and happiness; if wrong things, suffering. A happy or unhappy life is your own creation. Nobody else is responsible. If you remember this, you won't find fault with anybody. You are your own best friend as well as your worst enemy. (99) — Swami Satchidananda

Anyone who wants to prevent you from making other people happy is an enemy. If you are stopping yourself from making others happy, you are your own enemy. — Israelmore Ayivor

Then surely there is an adversary. There is something opposed to you. Something that desires to defeat you. You want to believe your enemy is the disease. You don't want to believe even for a minute that the enemy is your own body, this weak tent of flesh that cannot stand up against a speck of contagion, this fragile weave of muscle, bone, and soul that also cannot resist the power of flame nor the pull of the ground — Susan Meissner

These Taoists' ideas have greatly influenced all our theories of action, even to those of fencing and wrestling. Jiu-jitsu, the Japanese art of self-defence, owes its name to a passage in the Tao-teking. In jiu-jitsu one seeks to draw out and exhaust the enemy's strength by non-resistance, vacuum, while conserving one's own strength for victory in the final struggle.
In art the importance of the same principle is illustrated by the value of suggestion. In leaving something unsaid the beholder is given a chance to complete the idea and thus a great masterpiece irresistibly rivets your attention until you seem to become actually a part of it. A vacuum is there for you to enter and fill up the full measure of your aesthetic emotion. — Okakura Kakuzo

In money, and in life, you are very often your own worst enemy. You promise yourself you're going to diet, then eat not one or two French fries but a whole plate. You decide to really commit to saving for retirement, only to wind up with a new pair of shoes in your closet. — Jean Chatzky

Don't underestimate your own triumphs. Leave it to the enemy.
# Krishn — Sweety Shinde

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. — Anonymous

If you expect the battle to be insurmountable,
you've met the enemy.
It's you. — Khang Kijarro Nguyen

If you are going to use military force, then you ought to use overwhelming military force. Use too much and deliberately use too much; you'll save lives, not only your own, but the enemy's too. — Curtis LeMay

Because emotion clouds the rational, and many perspectives guide the full reality. To view current events as an historian is to account for all perspectives, even those of your enemy. It is to know the past and to use such relevant history as a template for expectations. It is, most of all, to force reason ahead of instinct, to refuse to demonize that which you hate, and to, most of all, accept your own fallibility. And — R.A. Salvatore

Take warning of the consequences of being nobody's enemy but your own. — Charles Dickens

Fear to fear. Be afraid to be afraid. Your worst enemy is within your own bosom. Get to your knees and cry for help, and then rise up saying, 'I will trust, and not be afraid.' — Charles Spurgeon

Surround yourself with the right people, and realize your own worth. Honestly, there are enough bad people out there in the world - you don't need to be your own worst enemy. — Lucy Hale

I smile bitterly at him, then weave an illusion of his face across my own. Raffaele's expression flickers in surprise for a moment before settling back into its pool of calm. "They may have a hard time finding me," I reply.
Raffaele gives me a tight smile in return. "Do not underestimate your enemies, Your Majesty," he says. — Marie Lu

You should leave your wife more time." "She has all day available." "I'm not kidding. If you don't, you're guilty not only on a human level but also on a political one." "What's the crime?" "The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women's intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn't realize it." I waited in silence for Pietro to respond. My husband reacted with sarcasm. "Elena can cultivate her intelligence when and how she likes, the essential thing is that she not take time from me." "If she doesn't take it from you, then who can she take it from?" Pietro frowned. "When the task we give ourselves has the urgency of passion, there's nothing that can keep us from completing it." I felt wounded, I whispered with a false smile: "My husband is saying that I have no true interest. — Elena Ferrante

This place sickened him. Anywhere else, you simply killed your enemy with a sword. Or poisoned him, if you had the honourless instincts of an assassin. Here, it was layer upon layer of constructed double-dealing, dark, polished and unpleasant. He would have assumed tonight the product of Laurent's own mind, if Laurent were not so clearly the victim. — C.S. Pacat

Some enemies are part and parcel of our lives, we cannot destroy them without risking our own survival — Bangambiki Habyarimana

Life has a complex plan that involves you and me.
While we dream, work and organize, life makes its own tweaks - and many times circumstances might not turn out as we hoped.
But life is not the enemy. It's not against us. Life provides opportunities for growth and strength of character.
Stop fighting against your greatest ally. — Jaime Buckley

Seemed to me a phone was an impersonal instrument. If it felt like it, it let your personality go through its wires. If it didn't want to, it just drained your personality away until what slipped through at the other end was some cold fish of a voice, all steel, copper, plastic, no warmth, no reality. It's easy to say the wrong thing on telephones; the telephone changes your meaning on you. First thing you know, you've made an enemy. Then, of course, the telephone's such a convenient thing; it just sits there and demands you call someone who doesn't want to be called. Friends were always calling, calling, calling me. Hell, I hadn't any time of my own. — Ray Bradbury

I am my own best friend and my own worst enemy. Before coming here, I was thinking I don't deserve it, that i wouldn't be able to meet your expectations, and that you had probably chosen the wrong candidate. At the same time, my heart was telling me that i was being rewarded because i hadn't given up and had fought to the end — Paulo Coelho

That's your best friend and your worst enemy - your own brain. — Fred Durst

Your own thoughts can be your worst enemy! — Tae Yun Kim

Sylvia Day spins a gorgeous adventure in A Touch of Crimson that combines gritty, exciting storytelling with soaring lyricism. Adrian is my favorite kind of hero
an alpha male angel determined to win the heart of his heroine, Lindsay, while protecting her from his lethal enemy. Lindsay is a gutsy, likable woman with paranormal abilities of her own, as well as a dedication to protecting humanity against a race of demonic monsters. This is definitely a book for your keeper shelf. — Angela Knight

Your worst enemy cannot hurt you as much as your own thoughts, when you haven't mastered them. — Gautama Buddha

Now there are many, many people in the world, but relatively few with whom we interact, and even fewer who cause us problems. So when you come across such a chance for practicing patience and tolerance, you should treat it with gratitude. It is rare. Just as having unexpectedly found a treasure in your own house, you should be happy and grateful toward your enemy for providing you that precious opportunity. Because if you are ever to be successful in your practice of patience and tolerance, which are critical factors in counteracting negative emotions, it is due to your own efforts and also the opportunity provided by your enemy. — Dalai Lama XIV

You're your own worst enemy, Marta always said to me. You don't need anyone to torment you because you do it to yourself. — James Patterson

You think of me that way because you look at me and at what I do through the lens of your mundane understanding of the world. Mundane humans create distinctions between themselves, distinctions that seem ridiculous to any Shadowhunter. Their distinctions are based on race, religion, nation identity, any of a dozen more irrelevant markers, To mundanes they seem logical, for though mundanes connote see, understand, or acknowledge the demon worlds, still somewhere found buried in their ancient memories, they know that there are those that walk this earth and are other. That do not belong, that mean only harm and destruction. Since the demon threat is invisible to mundanes, they must assign the threat to others of their own kind. They place the face of their enemy onto the face of their neighbor, and thus are generations of misery assured. — Cassandra Clare

According to the Theory of War, which teaches that the best way to avoid the inconvenience of war is to pursue it away from your own country, it is more sensible for us to fight our notorious enemy in his own realm, with the joint power of our allies, than it is to wait for him at our own doors. King Edward III (1339) — Ian Mortimer