Quotes about Self-reliance

If someone is bent on hurting herself, she'll find a way to do it. She was a grown woman; sooner or later, she was responsible for herself.

In the end you have only you.

Do I tell you how to braid your hair? Don't tell me how to plow a field.

I'm patient when it comes to my career, which is unlike me, but there are no stars in my eyes. I make where I go. It's that sort of thing.

The truth is that since childhood I had cultivated an existential independence. It came from perceiving the adults around me as unreliable, and without it I felt I wouldn't have survived. I cared deeply for everyone in my family, but in the end I depended on myself.

The enemy of human happiness as well as the cause of poverty and starvation is not the birth of children. It is the failure of people to do with the earth what God could teach them to do if only they would ask and then obey, for they are agents unto themselves.

I have nothing in common with lazy people who blame others for their lack of success.

It's all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

You have been given your own work to do. Get to it right now, do your best at it, and don't be concerned with who is watching you. Create your own merit.

I'd rather hop freights around the country and cook my food out of tin cans over wood fires, than be rich and have a home or work.

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

I want the people to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry.