Quotes about Self-sufficiency

He is poor, who has need of another, and has not from himself all things that are useful for life.

Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island. I said, I am a desert island. It was not what he had in mind.

I don't want a man around, what use are they except for ten seconds' worth of half babies. A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.

As long as you pretend to be self-sufficient, you short-circuit God's power in your life. You need to admit your inadequacy and say, "God, I can't handle this!"

Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.

I don't want anything handed to me, I want to work for everything I have... that's the way I've done everything in my life.

How happy is he born and taught That serveth not another's will; Whose armor is his honest thought, And simple truth his only skill! . . . . . . . This man is freed from servile bands Of hope to rise or fear to fall; Lord of himself though not of lands; And having nothing yet hath all. —SIR

There is a fine line between loneliness and independence.

I am not bound for any public place, but for ground of my own where I have planted vines and orchard trees, and in the heat of the day climbed up into the healing shadow of the woods.

Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God.

There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves. This condition would be that each instrument could do its own work, at the word of command or by intelligent anticipation, like the statues of Daedalus or the tripods made by Hephaestus, of which Homer relates that Of their own motion they entered the conclave of Gods on Olympus, as if a shuttle should weave of itself, and a plectrum should do its own harp playing.

When a man cuts himself absolutely adrift from custom, what an astonishingly light spar floats him! How few his wants are, after all!