Global Language and World Culture
Self-help great quotes

Self-help great quotes

Self-help aphorisms
Self-help aphorisms

Self-help great quotes, a self-guide series of thoughts and aphorisms that can certainly be useful for the personal growth and the achievement of your goals.

The Victorian Age is important not only in itself but also in its effects and its consequences which still mark our present times. Victorian were certainly class-conscious, but the vast wealth produced by the Industrial Revolution enabled people of all classes to improve their social position. One of the most popular books of the 19th century was Samuel Smiles Self-Help, published in 1859, which claimed that success was the product of four virtues, thrift, character, self-help and duty. Dickens novels are also filled with characters aspiring to better themselves.

Self-help or self-improvement is a self-guided series of thoughts and actions that can certainly be useful for the personal growth, from an economic, intellectual or emotional point of view. Good quotes and aphorisms can function as a strong stimulus to think and meditate about the right actions to do for our betterment.

From a psychological perspective the term self-help is associated with actions and interventions that a person can take on their own or with guided literature, as opposed to working with a clinician. Self-help can help you think about your goals with a big picture view. It encourages you to, for example, outline your short-term and long-term goals, and whether they are realistic and achievable. Self-help can also help you be more systematic in the way you approach the changes you want to see. For starters, making a list of the benefits of achieving your goals can be motivational, and setting a time frame for meeting both short-term and long-term goals helps, too.

Self-help is the best help.
American Proverb (Sayings of American origin)

Help yourself, and Heaven will help you.
Jean Fontaine

The codfish lays ten thousand eggs. The homely hen lays one. Codfish never cackles to tell you what she has done. And so we scorn the codfish, while the humble hen we prize, which only goes to show you that it pays to advertise!
Anonymous

Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.
Bruce Lee

Bruce Lee self-help quote
Bruce Lee self-help quote

I’m totally into new age and self-help books. I used to work in a bookstore and that’s the section they gave me, and I got way into it. I just loved the power of positive thinking, letting yourself go.
Jason Mraz

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
Ernest Hemingway

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
George Bernard Shaw

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.
Jim Rohn

Ultimately the greatest help is self-help.
Bruce Lee

You can’t be happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes.
Lauren Oliver

I’m really wary of self-help books.
Darin Strauss

I do believe in self-help.
Clint Eastwood

I do not believe in making the right decision, I make a decision and make it right.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah

It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.
Anne Frank

Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.
Dr. Seuss

They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.
Tom Bodett

I’ve experienced several different healing methodologies over the years – counseling, self-help seminars, and I’ve read a lot – but none of them will work unless you really want to heal.
Lindsay Wagner

I think that there is a tragic misfit at the core of me, and I’ve just done a lot of work on myself. I love a good self-help book; I’ve read a ton of them. I love self-help seminars and therapy and all that.
Jenna Fischer

What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense. They have no sense that life is fundamentally incomplete rather than accidentally incomplete.
Alain de Botton

A perfect poem you can’t pin down and say, ‘This is exactly what it meant to me.’ It’s not a self-help manual.
Alice McDermott

Self-help picture quote
Self-help picture quote

The one genre I’m not really into: self-help books.
Michiko Kakutani

I went through a phase in my 20s when I was overdosing on self-help books, so it was really refreshing to read ‘The Alchemist’ because it was a novel, but it still had the same wisdom, wasn’t patronising and didn’t tell you how you should live your life.
Tamzin Outhwaite

Self-help is something that I’ve always been into. I thought I was going to be a psychiatrist.
Charlamagne tha God

I was inspired by self-help books.
Rudy Ruettiger

Work-life balance is not just a buzzy, self-help term that real business people laugh at. You need it.
Stephanie Ruhle

My interest in self-help began when I was a child in the Seventies. My mum had a book she would consult regularly: ‘Passages’ by Gail Sheehy, which deals with the challenging stages of growing up.
Susanna Reid

I didn’t intend ‘Hector’ to be a self-help book when I first started writing. I wrote it as a little tale about a psychiatrist, like me, who sets off around the world in order to discover the vital ingredients for happiness.
Francois Lelord

One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking.
Julian Baggini

The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.
Chuck Palahniuk

Our thoughts make us what we are.
Dale Carnegie

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Dale Carnegie

Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own.
Bruce Lee

Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.
Corrie ten Boom

If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it’s not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.
Dalai Lama XIV

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
Marcus Aurelius

How would your life be different if…You stopped worrying about things you can’t control and started focusing on the things you can.
Steve Maraboli

It’s not time to worry yet.
Harper Lee

Whatever is going to happen will happen, whether we worry or not.
Ana Monnar

The more we value things, the less we value ourselves.
Bruce Lee

Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.
Benjamin Franklin

If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were.
Jodi Picoult

Self-help ideas
Self-help ideas

I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. “Never worry about your heart till it stops beating.
E.B. White

Worry is a misuse of the imagination.
Dan Zadra

If you look into your own heart, and you find nothing wrong there, what is there to worry about? What is there to fear.
Confucius

The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.
Elbert Hubbard

Worrying about it takes precious time and attention away from your priorities and increases your feelings of dissatisfaction about life.
Christina Winsey-Rudd

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.
William James

I try to only worry about things I have control over.
Steve Nash

Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. if encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.
Arthur Somers Rache

I have no regrets. I wouldn’t have lived my life the way I did if I was going to worry about what people were going to say.
Ingrid Bergman

I’m not a great believer in self-help.
Daniel Kahneman

All summer, I read fiction because you must read for the pleasure and beauty of it, and not only for research. I don’t read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don’t read self-help books because I don’t believe in shortcuts and loopholes.
Isabel Allende

Everything I’ve ever taught in terms of self-help boils down to this – I cannot believe people keep paying me to say this – if something feels really good for you, you might want to do it. And if it feels really horrible, you might want to consider not doing it. Thank you, give me my $150.
Martha Beck

Don ‘t hurry. Don’t worry. You’re only here for a short visit. So don’t forget to stop and smell the roses.
Walter Hagen

The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual.
Samuel Smiles

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.
Paulo Coelho

Sufi poetry is, in a sense, self-help poetry about how to live a decent life, how to deal with your mortality.
Mohsin Hamid

I dislike the word ‘self-help.’ Self-awareness, yes, but not self-help.
Deepak Chopra

Even though it doesn’t look like it, I run. On a treadmill. And I bounce around to all the songs on my iPod – the Pixies, Wagner, Richard and Linda Thompson, even books on tape. Just not self-help ones.
Bill Hader

It’s no accident that most self-help groups use ‘anonymous’ in their names; to Americans, the first step toward redemption is a ritual wiping out of the self, followed by the construction of a new one.
Walter Kirn

How any person decides to emphasize strengths and mitigate weaknesses is something people have to figure out for themselves. I’m wary of the self-help literature that suggests there are certain rules. I’m very happy for people to look at my story and say it’s possible to achieve many things.
Daniel Tammet

I consider the indiscriminate propagation of self-help to be morally unacceptable… self-help is the opposite of autonomous or vernacular life.
Ivan Illich

I go to a lot of self-help groups in the day, and then I can sleep pretty well at night.
Andy Biersack

Self-help advice
Self-help advice

I never read a self-help book except for the Bible.
Jon Heder

While I ridicule books of self-help, I’m also quite susceptible to them. They help simplify things.
Amitava Kumar

I’m not a fan of self-help books – how can something be ‘self-help’ if the book itself is purportedly helping you?
Harlan Coben

I can’t really stand self-help stuff myself.
Mark Manson

Any book is a self-help guide if you can take something from it.
Kevin Smith

I have had moments where I’ve had mental-health issues and I’ve felt like yoga and meditating and reading these Buddhist self-help books actually really help.
Mike White

I’m really into Deepak Chopra and self-help books.
Orianthi

I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.
Robert Greene

Many people come to self-help material because they feel like something is wrong with them or the way they are. The problem is that anything that tells you how to improve your life is also implying that there is something inherently wrong with you the way you are.
Mark Manson

I don’t read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don’t read self-help books because I don’t believe in shortcuts and loopholes.
Isabel Allende

Many self-help books give you these neat, tidy formulas that are really illusions. They dupe people into thinking, “Well if I can just do that, then everything’s going to be okay.” My work differs in that I don’t offer quick solutions and simple explanations.
John Bradshaw

I recommend anybody go to a bookstore, go down the self-help or new-age section, and just walk those aisles. See what book jumps out at you; there’s a good chance it’s a book you need in your life. That’s basically how I find the books that I read.
Tom Araya

I am the first person to go to Barnes & Noble and buy the new self-help book. I like to fill out the surveys, then I get my friends’ opinions on how I answered to see if I was being honest with myself or not.
Jessica Simpson

What I like about graduation speeches is that they’re an opportunity for someone to make sense of their life and to impart that wisdom to someone else. It’s like a sanctioned self-help moment.
Bruce Eric Kaplan

Go to any bookstore, and you’ll see thousands of books on etiquette, which suggests there’s a lot of self-help going on. There is hope.
Letitia Baldrige

The thing I love most about going to a book store is the self-help section is the biggest section because Americans know we’re screwed up. We know it. But we want to get better.
Hamza Yusuf

Human beings have kicked around the concept of what individual happiness means for centuries, from the Bible to the ancient Greeks to the 1859 bestseller ‘Self-Help.’
Mary Pilon

“Focusing” is no conventional repackaging of self-help wisdom. It is at once a manual and a philosophy. It talks about the body’s wisdom, the steps of the focusing technique, how to discover the richness in others by learning to listen.
Marilyn Ferguson

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, ‘Where’s the self-help section?’ She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
George Carlin

I’m not that into reading. If I’m gonna read, I’m gonna read some cool sci-fi book or something, not some stupid self-help book.
Jon Heder

Like every other self-respecting academic, I’m distrustful of self-help books.
Amitava Kumar

In academe, we ought to temper our criticism of the idea of self-help because, in a more complex way, it is precisely what we offer our students through our teaching.
Amitava Kumar

I worked at a nursing home though high school… There’s a lost appreciation for a generation that has so much to tell us when we’re so full of self-help books and doctors on TV.
Bonnie Hunt

I felt that no self-help book had been written for millennials yet, so my ultimate goal was to write it.
Mark Manson

Business coaching and the personal development and self-help industry is considered to be one of the booming industries today.
Brendon Burchard

Self-help quotes
Self-help quotes

Pain is important, and changing who you are is difficult, painful, and scary. Most of the self-help industry sees change as this euphoric, liberating thing and tells you that you can be happy all the time. I think the opposite.
Mark Manson

Self-help books are for the birds. Self-help groups are where it’s at.
Janice Dickinson

I’d been very partial to Malcolm X, particularly his self-help teachings.
Clarence Thomas

So many self-help ideas are like meringue – you take a big bite, and there’s nothing there.
Deborah Norville

Music is gathering. Taking our scattered thoughts and senses and coalescing us back into our core. Music is powerful. The first few chords can change us where no self-help books can.
Jane Siberry

As a business consultant, I am a voracious reader of self-help books, case studies of thriving companies, and the biographies and autobiographies of the world’s most successful people. I relentlessly implement the best ideas into my businesses.
Clay Clark

The Europeans had made two promises to the United States if Marshall Plan help was forthcoming. The first promise was maximum self-help on the part of every country; and second, maximum mutual aid.
Paul Hoffman

This is what he has been selling on the ‘The Apprentice’, through his self-help books, how to – you know, ‘Trump 101’ or the ‘Art of the Deal’ or, really, back to ‘Art of the Deal’. So almost the more he gets away with, the more he is reinforcing his brand.
Naomi Klein

I’ve read, like, 10,000 self-help books.
Jen Sincero

Labour grew out of popular movements of mutualism and self-help.
Liz Kendall

I’ve never read a self help book… the most self-help I’ve read is on a beer mat.
Ophelia Lovibond

I don’t want to get all self-help on everyone. But I definitely think there was a period in my life where I thought I would feel the same way, forever. And every day felt like ‘Groundhog Day,’ where I was super, super depressed.
Phoebe Bridgers

We live in a very mollycoddled society where the slightest bit of discomfort is seen as wrong, but that discomfort is there for a reason. It’s supposed to trigger some form of action, some form of change, a realization of a truth – something, and I think the self-help world has you believing that you should be happy all the time.
Matthew Hussey

Memory enhancement self-help programs abound and promise improved memory performance by the utilization of any number of seemingly unique techniques focused on the context of how information is encoded.
David Perlmutter

When I look for self-help books for myself, I used to be scared that I was going to pick up a book that would depress me even more.
Vinny Guadagnino

I don’t usually read self-help books, but I read a great book by a guy called Wayne Dyer: ‘The Power of Intention,’ which I loved.
Chris Pine

I can’t get enough of self-help books of all kinds.
Bruce Eric Kaplan

I don’t think of literary novels as self-help documents, although literature undoubtedly saved my life when I was young, enabling me to disappear into all manner of stories, to recognise feelings that I felt alone in.
Bill Clegg

My favorite books are psychology, self-help, and I’m fascinated by Jung, by dream work.
Laura Dern

The self-help section of national bookstore chains in America is one of the largest sections. In a way, it’s nothing new, and in another way, very new. People have always searched for answers; that’s why we have religion. People have always been seeking some relief from their own mortality.
Holly Hunter

I actually really wish I had written ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying’ as an unreliably narrated novel that is also a self-help book.
Elif Batuman

I start with something that makes me angry or confused, and then I write about it. It’s a form of self-help.
Brian K. Vaughan

You can also find a lot of help and inspiration reading the following articles:

Self-words quotes and aphorisms, quotations, ideas and thoughts, by famous writers and authors, from Self-Acceptance to Self-Interest


Self-words quotes and thoughts, aphorisms and ideas, by famous writers and authors, from Self-Knowledge to Selfishness.


Samuel Smiles book about Self-help


The Victorian Age


The Victorian Society


The Victorian literature


Self growth community